Connie, is the fic posted all together anywhere? I want to read it in toto.

Rebecca, thank you. I managed to swerve at the last minute away from the happy ending I SO did not want.

Not this section, not yet. I'm posting it as I write. I don't want to put it up on my website till it's all done.

I want to read it in toto.

In a DOG?!?! ;)

Herself, will e-mail feedback tonight, from home. Too much madness at work today.

In a DOG?!?! ;)

Drat it! It's too dark to read!

Herself, the Spike you write just rips my heart out. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff.

Amber, thank you so much. I really do lurves him to an absurd extent.

In a DOG?!?! ;)

Hahahahahahaha. PMM is right, of course.

Question to the populace: should I put the finished parts of the current V!Giles on my web as a WIP since it's taking me so long?

Yes

Because it's taking me forever to finish anything, I'm gonna post part 1 of part 2 of that thing I posted earlier. So there.

He was lying when told himself he didn't think about her. The first week, he thought about her every time Tara was up all night fussing and crying, wishing she was there to feed her and rock her to sleep. Lord knew he wasn't having any luck with it. Sleep was limited to the five minutes in between the baby's screaming fits, if he was fortunate.

After a week, he remembered what Angel had said about the vacuum and was pleasantly surprised when it worked. Sleep measured in hours rather than minutes was something of an improvement, even when he took into account the images that occasionally found him waking drenched in sweat, the memory of blood under his nails and bruises under his fingers forcing its way to the surface. He was lying when told himself he didn't dream about her, if dreaming was really the right word.

There were other dreams that interrupted his sleep, and just as violently. Dreams of a creeping panic that paralyzed him, trapping him in a world of empty cribs and unnatural silences. After those, he would stand by Tara's crib and watch her until she woke up.

To keep himself sane, he started several journals, each one devoted to a different aspect of Tara's development. To keep them afloat financially, he started tutoring language students at the university while sending off applications for teaching positions at small community colleges. The identity he'd paid for had a skill set close to his own, a smattering of experience, and some decent-but-not-glowing references. When Tara was six months old, he accepted a position one state to the north, gave notice to his landlord, and moved them from one small, run-down house to another.

In time, he learned to answer to his new name, although he still couldn't think of himself by it. Tara, who at eleven months was showing signs of being just as chatty as her mother, called him by whatever collection of syllables she found fitting, depending on which language he'd been using with her that week. When it seemed like she was going to stick with one which, thanks to her baby slurring, could be misconstrued as something not suitable for polite company, he decided to start sticking to human languages exclusively.

He didn't have much interaction with adults outside of the campus, so he found himself increasingly fascinated by his child. He tracked her likes and dislikes, and peculiar eating habits; carrots, bananas, and squash were deemed acceptable for putting in her mouth--as were the telephone and remote control--while peas and almost anything green were seen as purely decorative, presuming one was decorating the floor. He made the rare attempt to go out on dates, but babysitters were expensive and Tara didn't seem to like any of the women when he had them over for coffee, so second dates were rarer than souled vampires, and third dates rarer than souled lawyers, although he did manage a few casual flings.

Tara didn't say anything about her motherless state until she was four. After a playdate, she came home and announced almost proudly that she was bad.

"Why are you bad?" He asked, wondering if he really wanted to know what mischief she'd gotten into.

"Jenny's daddy said if she was bad, her mommy would leave. Mine left, so that means I'm bad. Bad bad bad!" She ran off to terrorize her stuffed animals, and he made a mental note that any further playdates with Jenny would not take place at Jenny's house.

Following that, she occasionally asked about mothers and where hers had gone. When a simple "away" no longer sufficed, he found other ways around the queries, and she soon stopped asking. On her birthdays, she opened her two cards without question, thanking him for his and filing the other with the feathers and shells and other scraps of some importance she kept in her room.

They lived a fairly Spartan life, which allowed him to purchase a modest house within a few miles of his job when Tara was six. The neighborhood wasn't the best, but it wasn't the worst, either. It was close to parks, and just far enough off the main arterial that it was safe for her to play in the front yard when supervised. He liked to watch Tara behead dandelions and poke at slugs with sharp sticks, although her unceasing and sometimes bloodthirsty defense of the garden reminded him more than a little bit of her mother. He fancied she had something of the look of Buffy about the face, although Tara's height and coloring had come from him.

He wasn't sure which one of them had contributed to her extreme stubbornness. Somehow, he suspected she came by it from both sides.

As soon as she was able to make arguments that went beyond the simple negation of a request, she delighted in them. Worse, she was convinced that she had the right of it, and that her father was simply failing to look at things in the correct light. Eating her supper before asking for dessert was considered a ridiculous notion, as was making her bed, which was just going to be slept in again at night.

Homework turned into a battleground on which neither side would easily yield. Although her test scores were always above average, he soon got used to uncomfortable discussions with her teachers about making certain she was living up to her full potential. Her nose was always in a book, but not, it seemed, her school books. The older she got, the more uncomfortable the discussions, and the more firmly entrenched she and he grew in their respective positions.

"I just don't see why," she complained when confronted with her grade seven marks, "if I'm getting A's on all the tests, it should matter if I do the busy work."

"It matters because at some point, you won't be able to simply coast through things. You're going to require a certain amount of discipline in your studies." It seemed a perfectly obvious thing to him, but his daughter wasn't convinced.

"But I don't need it now, so what's the hurry?" At his skeptical look, she sighed and rolled her eyes before explaining further. "It's not that I don't like to study, it's just that if I don't need to, why should I? I mean, it's not like I'm not already fluent in all the languages they offer, my grammar's just fine, and I'm getting by in math and Earth science."

"Your marks are going to matter when it comes time for you to apply for university."

"I'll worry about that when the time comes. Right now, I've got more important things to think about." Tara winced at the airy pomposity with which she'd spoken.

"Heaven save me from thirteen year olds who are going on thirty. You're a truly obnoxious child, do you know that?" He sipped his coffee to hide a smile.

Tara grinned, a looking a little embarrassed. "Don't forget lazy and ungrateful."

"Yes, you're also those, especially the first. Will you at least try to turn in your schoolwork?"

"Buy me a pony?"

"No, but I may raise your allowance."

She looked at him, considering the offer. "Okay. I'll accept bribes. Want to watch a movie?"

They settled in and watched a classic horror film that she'd insisted they rent the night before. Tara was engrossed; he catalogued the numerous factual errors, thankful that it was just a werewolf movie. He wasn't certain if he could stand to sit through Dracula. As it turned out, he soon found that if he just pretended it was a parody, he was fine. Tara, it seemed, had developed a taste for the things.