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.

First three parts (already published here) of the new V!Giles up on my website [link]

More will be up soon!

That summer, he had the opportunity to take over teaching a fencing class. Tara came along for the first few sessions, but soon begged off.

"All the women are flirting with you, Dad. It's gross, and I'd rather not sit and watch it," she informed him. "I'll just stay here and try not to think about it."

He laughed at the notion, but somehow found himself going out for coffee with one of the students, a woman named Amy. She had bright red hair, a wicked sense of humor, several animals, and a job she hated. By their third date, he found himself wondering if he'd accidentally made a sacrifice to some minor deity. By the fifth, he started wondering in all seriousness if it was a missing sign that an apocalypse was coming.

Tara refused to admit that her father was dating someone for as long as she could. When Amy started to spend several nights a week in their house, she grudgingly stopped referring to her as "that woman" and began to refer to her as "Dad's girlfriend." She was generally polite, saving her snits for the times when it was least convenient and most embarrassing, like right before he and Amy were supposed to go out with some of his fellow teachers.

"I'm certain she didn't mean it." Wesley handed Amy a stiff drink and a box of tissues before going off in search of his daughter.

She was in the backyard, whacking a broken branch against the trunk of the apple tree.

"Tara?"

"What?" She didn't look up or stop wielding the branch.

"You should apologize to Amy for what you said. We're staying in tonight. She doesn't really feel like going out anymore."

Tara shrugged and hit the trunk harder. "Whatever. It's not like I said anything too bad."

"You called her the Whore of Babylon. I can't imagine what you were thinking that was worse, and I certainly don't want to hear it. Now go in and apologize, please."

She complied, and the three of them ended up on the couch watching a Film Noir marathon. He listened to them discuss the movies, for once feeling quite happy to not be part of the discussion. Tara and Amy had a fair amount in common, and when the relationship ended, Tara took it almost as badly as he did. It had been an amicable enough parting, but they both missed her.

Life went back to its regular routine. Tara completed her first year of high school with high marks and a fairly hefty allowance. She had a small but close group of friends, and spent any time that wasn't assigned to homework or chores in their company. He saw her mainly in passing, and tried to quell the sense of unease that fact produced.

 ***

The nightmares started a few weeks into summer break.

Tara was no stranger to nightmares. She'd had bad ones for as long as she could remember; vivid dreams of paralysis where she had something important she had to say but her lips wouldn't move and so she just stood there, mouth frozen, while everyone around her went away and there was nothing she could do to stop them. These new nightmares were different. For one thing, they didn't feel like dreams.

She woke up after the first one, breathing hard and not certain how she'd gotten from the street to her bed before she realized that it wasn't real, that she'd been asleep the whole time. She looked at her hands, puzzled by the lack of blood and dust. One hand crept to her throat; her pulse was definitely racing like she'd been doing something a hell of a lot more strenuous than just sleeping, and her skin was damp.

Too many monster movies, that was all, even if it wasn't like any monster movie she'd ever seen, and she'd seen a lot of them. She looked at the clock. 4:47. Even if she could go back to sleep, the sun would be up soon. Tara wasn't really a morning person, but she decided she could always nap if she got tired. She got out of bed, went to the living room, and curled up on the couch to watch infomercials and home shopping channels with the sound off until she figured she could move around the house without waking up her dad.

He frowned in her direction when he came downstairs. "What on earth are you doing awake?"

Tara hit the off button on the remote and unfolded herself from the couch. "Couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd just kill time until morning."

"What was it this time? Too much coffee, or did you just sleep in for too long yesterday?"

"Neither. Just a bad dream, that's all."

She was exceedingly thankful when he let it pass without comment. Sharing things like nightmares with him had been uncomfortable since the first time she noticed the flash of guilt that appeared on his face whenever she'd bring them up. Sometimes she wondered if it had something to do with her mother, but she knew better than to open that can of worms.

The next night she had the same dream and woke up in the same disturbed state. Tara was starting to miss the normal stable of nightmares; they just left her depressed, not twitchy and filled with some sort of dreadful anticipation. She didn't bother to go downstairs to kill time with the television, choosing instead to count the books on her shelf and reorder them by genre, author, and publisher until it was time to get breakfast.

The shadows under her eyes gave her away.

"You didn't sleep again last night, did you?" her father groused from across the table.

Tara shrugged her shoulders. "I slept some."

"More nightmares?" he asked quietly.

"Yeah."

"Have you thought that perhaps you might want to avoid watching horror films before going to bed?" She loved it when her parent stated the obvious as though it were some pronouncement from on high.

"I'll try that." She'd also try finding things to do to distract herself from the long, boring summer days. If her mind was going to insist on being over active, she'd just have to give it something new on which to focus. Leigh probably had some ideas. Which reminded her, she wanted to move her bedroom somewhere a little more private--having one right next to her dad's meant he could hear everything she did. "I was thinking maybe I should change rooms. Maybe it's the light from the street that's doing it."

"You're alarmingly transparent at times, Tara. If you want to sleep in the basement bedroom, you may."

"That obvious?"

"More so. I haven't heard anything that flimsy in, well, in quite some time, at any rate."

Switching rooms didn't stop the nightmares, but it did leave her more room to distract herself. She disabled the alarm on the egress window, knowing full well that if everything went as she hoped it would, she'd need to use it to get in and out of the house undetected.

 ***

Any relationship has rules, some spoken aloud and spelled out with their own distinct set of punishments and consequences should they be broken, others never mentioned, formed from reactions to events.

Tara's relationship with her father had several of both. The first set included such things as "don't leave your things scattered around where anyone might trip over them," "no going out without checking in first," and "no taking the last cup of coffee without brewing another pot." This sort of rule had exceptions and loopholes, all of which she was quite adept at manipulating. The second set was trickier. By the time she turned 15, she knew better than to break any of them.

No asking about her mother; no wondering about grandparents, aunts, or uncles; no speculation about what her father had done at her age. No questions about the past, period.

She didn't even know her mother's name.

In the rare instances she was mentioned at all, it was always "your mother." "Your mother did what she had to do, she hadn't much choice" or "of course your mother loved you." Once, on the only occasion she'd ever seen her father drunk--right after the break-up with Amy, when Tara was doing her best to try and cheer him up--it was "you look just like your mother when you do that."

She looked in the mirror, trying to see it. Everyone had always told her she looked just like her father, but then, they couldn't really be expected to say anything else, could they? All she saw in the reflection was the same thing she saw every day. A tallish girl with an untidy mop of dark brown hair and a figure that wouldn't have looked out of place on a 12 year old boy. All things she could trace back to her father.

She moved closer to the mirror, ready to get on with the second part of the daily ritual. Maybe there was something of her mother in the eyes? They were the same shade of blue as her dad's, but the shape was different. His crinkled up when he smiled, where hers always looked a little sad. Maybe it was her mouth, its softness and hint of an overbite just slightly at odds with the gawky angles of the rest of her.

It had to be somewhere. He wouldn't have said anything if it wasn't.

She ended her reverie the same way she always did: a splash of cold water on her face and a grim smile. At least she knew damned well which side of the family had given her the gluttonous need to torture herself. In that, at least, she was very much her father's child. She was just more skilled than him when it came to hiding it.

There was still a third of a pot of coffee left when she made her way to the kitchen, as well as half a box of doughnuts. Sweet, starchy food. Dad was either researching or grading papers.

"Is it ridiculous to expect at least one of them to use a spell-checker?" he grumbled by way of greeting.

"English 97?"

"Yes."

"In that case, yes, it's ridiculous. Especially seeing as it's summer quarter. Why are there no maple bars?"

He didn't look up from the stack of papers. "I must have eaten them. There should be some jellies left, however."

"No thanks. I think I'll just have coffee."

She stared at him over her mug, comparing his features to her own.

Yes, the eyes were certainly different. The mouth, too.

"Do you have plans tonight?"

She blinked. She did have plans, as usual. Not that she'd wanted to mention them to him. She somehow doubted he'd approve of her latest hobby.

"I'm studying with Leigh and Emily. Catch up on our summer reading and all that. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. I just thought perhaps you'd like to see a movie."

"Maybe some other time. Besides, I already told you, no more creature-features for me."

He frowned. "There are other types of movies besides horror, you know."

"I know. Like I said, some other time. We can have a 90's film fest and eat popcorn until our stomachs hurt, but tonight is for studying."

It wasn't a complete lie. They'd be studying, just not books.

He went back to grading papers. She was willing to bet he didn't know she knew he was only doing it to hide his disappointment. It had been just the two of them for so much of her life; the year and a half during which he and Amy were together was the only serious relationship of his that she could remember. Maybe if she hadn't been such a needy pain-in-the-ass of a daughter, it would have worked out. She hadn't intended to drive a wedge between them, not really. She'd liked Amy.

Introspection was, as always, a bitch. She rinsed her cup and brewed a fresh pot by way of silent atonement, then mopped the floor for good measure. The house was always cleaner when she was feeling guilty about something. If her father had noticed that peculiarity, he hadn't let on.