Reposting: California Dreaming
Oct. 20th, 2008 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
like_a_ravenOriginally writen in January of 2005, 467 words on Giles, basically canonical. If his father's name ever was mentioned, would someone let me know? Thanks to Joan, aka ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
preppywitch, for the beta. Feedback welcome and appreciated.
Usual disclaimers -- don't own, no harm or disrespect intended, etc.
California Dreaming
Rupert Giles was eleven when he first announced his intention of emigrating to the States, on a particularly grey and miserable day. His grandmother (to whom this grand announcement had been made) remarked that the United States was a frightfully big country, and asked if had he decided on any particular place. He hadn’t, of course, but he was not about to admit that.
“California,” he announced decidedly. Then added, “It is sunny there, and I think the people will suit me.” He was basing this on his acquaintance with an American colleague of his father’s, a Miss Jordan Beaumont, a woman who drove too fast, drank too much, called him “buddy” and called his father “babe.” To Rupert, who had never even heard his mother call his father anything but “Algernon,” Miss Beaumont was endlessly and utterly fascinating.
Nor did his opinion (either of California or of Miss Beaumont) change over the next few years. California was everything England was not – sunlit, young (hell, he figured the universities there were newer than the moss on the walls in Oxford), a place of peace and love and freedom, San Francisco with sodding flowers in your bloody hair.
And while he knew, rationally, that that his vision of the place was rather idealized (all right, it was completely idealized), an El Dorado, there was one unmistakable, undeniable fact. California was over 5000 miles away from the Council, from hidebound rules and venerated tradition, from a future of responsibilities he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.
In the end, though, he stayed in England, and he and London settled for each other, adapted to each other, suited each other. And when, some thirty years after his announcement to his grandmother, he actually was asked to go to California, he found that he didn’t really want to. But he went.
It was not El Dorado, and there was no escape from new and terrifying responsibilities that he still hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, but which he had accepted and ultimately embraced. In time, he grew to love California. As it happened, the people did suit him. He made a point of looking up Miss Beaumont, now in her sixties, living in Monterey, still driving fast and drinking hard and now calling Rupert “babe.”
He finds things in California he’d never found in England, deep love, deeper loss, pride in himself and in Buffy and her friends, a sense of being exactly where he belongs. But no freedom, and peace only when he is, once again, unconscious.
But some days, when an apocalypse looms, or certain old friends come calling, or (God help him) Spike is chained up in his bathtub, he looks up at a clear blue Sunnydale sky, and he longs for the cool grey clouds over London.
preppywitch, for the beta. Feedback welcome and appreciated.Usual disclaimers -- don't own, no harm or disrespect intended, etc.
California Dreaming
Rupert Giles was eleven when he first announced his intention of emigrating to the States, on a particularly grey and miserable day. His grandmother (to whom this grand announcement had been made) remarked that the United States was a frightfully big country, and asked if had he decided on any particular place. He hadn’t, of course, but he was not about to admit that.
“California,” he announced decidedly. Then added, “It is sunny there, and I think the people will suit me.” He was basing this on his acquaintance with an American colleague of his father’s, a Miss Jordan Beaumont, a woman who drove too fast, drank too much, called him “buddy” and called his father “babe.” To Rupert, who had never even heard his mother call his father anything but “Algernon,” Miss Beaumont was endlessly and utterly fascinating.
Nor did his opinion (either of California or of Miss Beaumont) change over the next few years. California was everything England was not – sunlit, young (hell, he figured the universities there were newer than the moss on the walls in Oxford), a place of peace and love and freedom, San Francisco with sodding flowers in your bloody hair.
And while he knew, rationally, that that his vision of the place was rather idealized (all right, it was completely idealized), an El Dorado, there was one unmistakable, undeniable fact. California was over 5000 miles away from the Council, from hidebound rules and venerated tradition, from a future of responsibilities he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.
In the end, though, he stayed in England, and he and London settled for each other, adapted to each other, suited each other. And when, some thirty years after his announcement to his grandmother, he actually was asked to go to California, he found that he didn’t really want to. But he went.
It was not El Dorado, and there was no escape from new and terrifying responsibilities that he still hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, but which he had accepted and ultimately embraced. In time, he grew to love California. As it happened, the people did suit him. He made a point of looking up Miss Beaumont, now in her sixties, living in Monterey, still driving fast and drinking hard and now calling Rupert “babe.”
He finds things in California he’d never found in England, deep love, deeper loss, pride in himself and in Buffy and her friends, a sense of being exactly where he belongs. But no freedom, and peace only when he is, once again, unconscious.
But some days, when an apocalypse looms, or certain old friends come calling, or (God help him) Spike is chained up in his bathtub, he looks up at a clear blue Sunnydale sky, and he longs for the cool grey clouds over London.
