The lights were dime and a soft mournful jazz tune filled the air. Nothing was stirring in the room except the occasional rise and fall of his left arm as he brings the tumbler to his lips. Amber liquid sloshes about in the glass as he does; hoping against all better knowledge that he might drink the day's events into oblivion so he might free himself from this grief.

'It hurts, dear Lord, it hurts,' he says to the nothingness that surrounds him.

She had only ever truly been his once, but it had stayed with him since. She had been his source of adult conversation and a nice cuppa for so long. 'Lord it hurts.'

'This is why watchers don't marry,' be muttered into his drink ruefully. 'Our lives are all buggered up with danger and daily near-death experiences. But this, this was not the mystical evil his slayer fought on a nightly basis. No this was another beast entirely; nature in all her malevolent glory. Oh yes, nature was a fickle woman with her cruel fates caring death's eager scythe. 'The bloody circle of life my British arse.' One lived, one died, now as they had in the beginning of time.

He gazed down at the picture in his left hand; taken only a short time before. Dawn in all her whiney teenage glory had pestered everyone for something fun to do. Joyce seeing that none of the other were going to take her off to do anything ordered the enter group for a sunny outing to the beach. Politely insisting it would do me good to spend some time in the sun my self.

A shallow smile crossed his face at the memory. It had been a good day. The Dawn, Willow and Tara had sun bathed while he and Joyce spent most of the day talking quietly over history and art. Xander and Dawn built a sand castle in effort to teach Anya something to do that should she "couldn't do at home." Somewhere around lunch, Joyce had asked a near by sun bather to snap a few pictures with her camera.

So there they were, a moment in time captured; spread out across a red checkered table cloth with enough sandwiches and chips to feed a small army in a photo that he had come to treasure.

Buffy smiling widely as she leaned against her mother's slightly sunburned shoulder. Willow and Tara were smiling and blushing as they cuddled near by. Anya and Xander hand in hand, smiling like the world couldn't get any better. Dawn sprawled out on her tummy at the bottom of the frame, a sandwich in one had and a musty tome of some sort in the other. There he was sitting to Joyce's other side with a look that Dawn called "the Giles" looking neither pleased nor displeased to be were I was at the time.

And Joyce, dearest Joyce, sitting there in the center of the whole mess, with her sun burnt shoulders, a can of coke in her hand, and the happiest smile anyone could ever ask for on her face, the smile of a mother who couldn't be happier if she tried.

It is what she was after all. She was the mother to all of them. Loving and worrying over each one of their little rag-tag group as if each of the children in the photo instead of just the two that actually were.

She had quietly come to play the mother of the group and he the father. It had worked well. After all they hadn't lost one yet despite the darkness that felt like it was trying to eat them alive most of the time.

But now, now she was gone, and it was left to him to play the part of father and mother to five segregate daughters and one segregate son, well two if you count the vampire that spent more time with them than apart from them, but he really didn't like to think of that.

Watchers were always meant to be alone; to live and die a solitary life with a protégé that they were never suppose to have any type feelings for. But now that one part of his life, his heart, was gone, he couldn't understand how any watcher before him and been able to live such a life so lacking in love, friendship, family, and simple caring.

He downed the finial gulp of scotch and sat the glass down before stumbling up the stairs.

To sleep perchance to dream of her.