-Three Weeks Later, During "The Body"-

The world falls out from under her feet when she hears the message. "Buffy, your mom, hospital." It has to be pretty desperate circumstance when Giles can't even form a complete sentence.

She thought it was all over. She thought her mom was better. This whole thing is just really, really unfair.

He's in the waiting room bouncing Alec. The kid isn't even fussing, and Buffy suspects the motion might be more about calming Giles than calming the kid.

"What happened?" she asks.

"We're sitting there having tea, and all of a sudden she says she has a headache. Just like she used too, except, different. A second later she told me that she was dizzy, but her speech was all slurred. I called 911. Then she just…fell. I did CPR. I did it until they came," he says, stunned.

"It's going to be fine," she tells him. It's the kind of thing that he used to tell her all of the time.

"No, Buffy, I don't think so," he says.

She takes the baby from Giles, but she can tell right away that this isn't actually providing the help that she thought it would. He needs to comfort someone else right now, and it isn't right to deprive him of that. She hands him his son back.

"She'll be fine. The doctors…" Buffy begins trying to comfort him like he did to her so many times. Just then they are interrupted by a doctor.

"Are you Joyce Summer's family?" the man asks softly.

"Yes," Buffy says rushing toward him, but Giles is unwilling to move.

"I'm very sorry…" he begins, and Giles feels like he has been punched in the gut.

"You have to help her. Do whatever you need to…." Buffy continues.

"I'm sorry," the doctor interrupts her to repeat. He thinks that he is delivering a message, but it is no more than a repeat of the empty message he's already given her.

"No, you have to…" Buffy says, beginning to understand, but unwilling to let the silence allow it to sink into her head.

"Buffy," Giles says, touching her shoulder softly.

She turns to him and begins to weep uncontrollably, falling apart in a way she wouldn't be able to if she was alone.

"Buffy, I have to get Dawn, from school," he says a few minutes later after Buffy has exhausted herself from crying and the doctor has left.

"I'll come with," she says.

-Later-

By the time they get out of the school Alec is the only one not crying. He's just lost his mother, but he doesn't have a clue.

The rest of them know it, at least on some intellectual level, but it doesn't seem real to them right now.

Giles offers to drop the girls off at home before he deals with funeral arrangements. The girls volunteer to come along, not out of some desperate need to make the funeral a certain way, but rather out of a need not to be left alone.

They are halfway through the meeting when Buffy realizes that Giles is the only one even remotely qualified to do this.

She can't even plan her mother's funeral.

What if Giles wasn't here? She'd be in charge of not only this, but of raising younger siblings. Then she realizes if Giles wasn't in her life it would only be one sibling.

That is hard for her to imagine.

-A Week Later-

He tried to ignore it. He thought that maybe he could pretend it away. Maybe if he just gave her a little time to grieve it would be ok.

Then he noticed a few more rare artifacts go missing, and he knew that he couldn't ignore it anymore.

He waits until Buffy leaves for parole, and then he goes up to the girl's room.

"Dawn," he says softly.

"Yes," she says, completely unsuspecting.

"You took earrings from my magic shop," he says.

"I apologized, and gave them back. I didn't know they were cursed." Then she turns to him in horror. "That didn't have anything to do with mom's death did it?"

"No!" he practically shouts. Maybe he should have waited longer after her mother's death before he brought this up. Maybe bad behavior was to be expected when someone just lost a parent.

"Ok, well, did the curse make something else bad happen?"

"Was it the only thing that you took?" he asks.

Her eyes give her away before she can stop it.

"How long has this been going on, Dawn?" he asks.

She goes over to her jewelry box, and dumps it onto the bed, saying, "It started when Mom first got sick. I knew that it was wrong, and I knew that it didn't really make sense, but whenever I took something I felt better for a little bit. It's stupid."

"It's common," he corrects. "These aren't all from the magic shop."

She shakes her head, hanging it in shame.

"Dawn, have you been stealing from shops?"

She nods her head lightly.

"Well, this all has to go back, and you are going to have to pay them interest for the time that you had their belongings. If you don't have enough money, you can borrow it from me, and you can work at the magic shop to pay it back. I'm going to go through your stuff every now and again to make sure you haven't started stealing again. Does all of this sound fair?"

She nods her head slowly, "You've got to hate me."

"Of course not Dawny. I love you, but I do worry about you."

"How do you make the pain go away?" she asks suddenly, meeting him eye to eye.

He shifts uncomfortably trying to figure out how honest to be in his answer. "Mostly I don't. I hurt all the time, Dawn. Pain isn't fun, but that doesn't mean that it is something to run from."

"Is it going to hurt forever?" Dawn asks softly.

"Yes," he admits, and when her face falls he adds, "But not like this. Grief doesn't stop hurting, but it gets less sharp. It reaches the point where you can live with it without it pulling you apart. I lost some friends in my Ripper days, Dawn. It hurt so bad that I thought I would never be able to survive it without something to dull the pain. So I used magic and drugs. It didn't make the pain less, not really, not for more than a couple seconds, and it came with its whole other set of problems. I had to get over all of those addictions, and then I still had to deal with the pain. I don't want that for you. Let's just deal with the pain."

Dawn nods. Giles give her a tiny half smile, then reaches out his arms, and gives her a hug.

-A month later "The Gift"-

"She saved the world. A lot." What better words could you use to sum up the life of Buffy Summers?

They aren't enough though. Nothing would be enough.

When Giles first became a Watcher he knew that he was going to lose his Slayer. Almost all Watchers did. That was before he met her. That was before the two of them had become closer than family. That was before he became her stepfather. That was before he had promised her dying mother that he would take care of her.

He hadn't done that. He'd let her die. He'd watched her die.

It was a good death, a death that saved her sister, and the rest of the world, but it was a death all the same.

-Later that night-

Dawn can't sleep. She gets up to go watch some TV. She freezes in the hallway when she hears Giles downstairs talking to his mother.

"You should come home," Matilda says.

"I am home," he says.

"Giles, you have a responsibility to your offspring. It made sense to stay in the Colonies when Joyce was alive. It even made sense when Buffy was alive, after all the Slayer ought to stay by the Hell Mouth, but now… You know that your father and I have raised children before."

"Are you saying that I am not a good father?" Giles asks with his voice sounding a little bit terse.

"Of course not. But no one can do this alone," Matilda replies.

Dawn doesn't wait around to hear Giles's response. She goes to her room and drowns her pillow in tears. Everyone leaves her.

-The next morning-

Dawn stays completely silent throughout the large British breakfast (this one complete with blood pudding).

"Dawny, are you ok?" he asks. He flinches as soon as she says it, knowing it's a ridiculous question. Of course she isn't ok, her sister just died.

Dawn shrugs.

"We'll go get Alec ready for the day," Jasper says, picking up his grandson and making a hasty retreat.

"So when are you leaving?" Dawn asks bitterly.

"What are you talking about?" Giles asks.

"Mom is gone, Buffy is gone. You and Alec don't really have a reason to stay here anymore do you?"

"Dawn, we are not about to go anywhere unless you are coming too. Where is this coming from?" he asks.

"I heard you talking to Matilda last night about leaving," Dawn says.

"Oh, honey. Your grandmother invited us to come live with her in England, all of us. She's worried about my being a single father," he explains.

"So I'm going too?" Dawn asks stunned.

"I wasn't actually planning on going. I didn't want to uproot you from everything you've ever known. But…grandparents are important, and maybe I am not qualified to raise you and Alec by myself."

"No! That wasn't what I was saying. Giles, you're like the best ever. I just thought…I'm not really your daughter, and I wasn't sure…"

"You weren't really your Mom's daughter either. Not physically anyway," he points out. "You and I, Dawn, we're together forever, for better or worse."

"You know I don't really have anything to be uprooted from right, not really. I mean, I have a lot of memories of Sunnydale, but they're all fake?"

"Do you want to go to England?" he asks in surprise.

She smiles. "British accents are dreamy."

He looks at her surprised.

"Well, not in you obviously, because you are old."

He giggles. Then his face grows a bit more grave. "I'm not sure I'm ready for you to be thinking of anyone's accent as dreamy."

She leans against his shoulder giggling.

-Three Months Later During "The Bargaining"-

Dawn knows there is something wrong as soon as she walks into the house after school. Matilda is baking cookies. She always gets Susie Homemaker when she is worried.

"Where is Giles?" she asks.

"In America," Jasper says directly.

"What?" Dawn asks in shock.

"He didn't want to come get you out of school. He knew that was hard for you when your mom died," Matilda explains.

"Someone died?" Dawn asks, feeling as if she is going to break apart for sure this time.

"No, honey, no, the opposite actually," Jasper says.

"What is the opposite of dying?" she asks. Then she realizes, "Oh my God, Buffy is alive?"

Her grandparents nod, and smile thinking that she would be ecstatic at the news.

"My sister came back to life, and he didn't think I might want to go see her?" she asks.

"We didn't say that," Jasper says handing her a ticket., "He didn't want to traumatize you by pulling you out of school. So we waited to take you."

"You're going too?" Dawn asks surprised.

"Of course, our Buffy has come back to life!" Matilda says.

-Two weeks Later-

"I can't believe you guys were living in England," Buffy says in shock a couple of days later.

"I thought your sister could do with a bit more family," Giles tells her softly. "So are you going back there?" Buffy asks sadly.

"Not unless you want to come with us. We're a family, and if you think it is important to stay around the Hell Mouth we can do that," Giles tells her.

"I feel like I've been keeping you away from your home for a long time, for way too long," Buffy says sadly.

"You and your siblings are my home," he tells her. "I am perfectly happy staying here."

-The End-