Analyzing time?? This one’s really long and it is 5am, forgive me
he was doing the nervous hand rub thing before they started talking :/
“It was Marlene. She hired us to smuggle her to some Fireflies. It went bad. Tess got bit. She made me swear to take the kid.” voice cracks :/ though it’s for Tess. Mans cannot process grief and is still struggling. I want to hug him so bad. “It was her dying wish, what the hell was I supposed to do?”
“We made it as far as K.C., and then, y’now, she saved my life there from another kid. Five years ago I would’ve destroyed him. But that had to shoot him to save me. Fourteen years old.” Second voice crack. Because she’s 14. Because she shouldn’t have to do that, like he told her in that store. She’s just a kid. A, supposed to be innocent and happy, kid.
“Because I was too slow and too fucking deaf to hear him comin’. And I saw…I saw a man kill his own brother to save her life while I just watched.”
Something he couldn’t move. Something he wanted to stop. And when he did find his feet and felt like he was able to do more than watch, he was stopped. He was prevented from getting to her. To protecting her. To cleansing that fear that was eating away at every muscle in his body. To grab her and check her and make sure she wasn’t hurt. How he couldn’t stop her from seeing Henry do that. Or how he couldn’t have stopped Sam from turning.
“And today, I thought that dog was gonna tear her apart because it smelled somethin’ on her. And all I did was stand there. I couldn’t…move.” And his voice is so shaky. Because the fear is too much for him. It’s been too much for him mentally, and now it’s even too much for him physically. Showing itself outwardly and coming out in little nervous ticks of anxiety, as well as panic attacks.
“I couldn’t think of anything, is- I just…I was so afraid.”
Now, let’s hope I can write out the thoughts my brain likes to tease me with but ultimately keeps a secret. It’s not just “I was afraid” or “I was scared” or whatever. It’s “I was so afraid.” I was petrified. He is so wracked with a constant overwhelming, debilitating, and exhausting fear over her and her safety. The thought of a dog smelling any infection in her and tearing her to shreds. Of how they were surrounded and Joel wouldn’t be able to take all of them. How they’d shoot her on site and she’d fall behind him while panic, fear, and anger rise in him as he bends beside her dead body. How he has a panic attack, right here, because he’s staring at this man with his rifle pointed right at Ellie, waiting for that dog to bark so he can fire. How Joel’s hearing goes out. How it’s all muffled and and morphed. How he thinks ‘this could be it, again’. How he knows this dog could smell it and that there’s no way, just like all the people before, to prevent it. But what brings him out of those rampaging thoughts and that panic is her laughing. Her. Those thoughts are calmed and taken under control when that wonderful, wonderful sound hits his ears. That sound he’s fallen asleep to. The sound that calms him down. Down enough to bring him out of a panic attack and enough to lull him to sleep.
“You think I can still handle things, but…I’m not who i was. I’m weak.” Joel miller, stoic man, who wholeheartedly believes emotions are a weakness. It’s what he’s built up against the last twenty years. And when Ellie comes and tears that down and makes him feel again, it’s so much. He used to be strong, ruthless. Now he’s vulnerable and weak. For caring about his little girl.
“Lately, there are these moments where the fear comes up out of nowhere and…and my heart feels like it’s stopped.”
Oh to love someone so incredibly much that thinking about them and their safety and how you need to protect them sends you into a panic attack. As terrible as it is, that seems pretty profound to me.
“And I have dreams every night. (What kind of dreams?) I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I just know that, when I wake up, I’ve lost somethin’.
‘Somethin’ used to be Sarah, and now it’s Ellie, at least a few times. Maybe they take each others spots. Maybe Ellie dies the way Sarah does. Maybe Sarah gets torn apart by that dog. Maybe it’s their faces morphing back and forth in that grass as she cries and grips at him, costing his arm and neck in her blood. Maybe it’s Ellie calling him dad. Maybe it’s Sarah under that runners thrashing arms and teeth.
“I’m failin’ in my sleep.” WHAT THE HELL CRAIG. “It’s all I do. All I’ve ever done.”
It’s all he ever does. He’s a walking failure. He cannot be right, no matter how hard he tries. Even before the apocalypse, he forgot to buy pancake mix so that Sarah could make them birthday pancakes, and he forgot their cake. He never even got to get their cake. And he swore on his life he would. Another fail. Every person he’s ever murdered, especially the innocent. Every failed attempt at protecting someone. Tess, Henry, Sam, Tommy. All failures. It’s all he’s ever done.
“Is fail her. Again and again and again.”
‘Fail her’. Disappointment in his face at himself, almost. Because that’s who Joel Miller is. A failure and inevitably disappointed at himself for not being able to stop it. Stop Sarah, Tess, bill and Frank, or Henry and Sam. And now, stop Ellie. How, when the time comes, because it always does, he won’t be able to stop it. Because he’s cursed and all he can do, without a shadow of a doubt, is fail. And how her is turning into both of them. It’s a gray area. She’s a gray area. He’s having nightmares of both. He’s failing both. But we can barely tell the difference anymore. But it’s his kid. And a parent should never feel like they failed their child. And yet he does, a million times over
“I’m gonna get her killed, I know it. I know it. I have to leave her.”
‘Just like I killed Sarah’. And he can’t do it. He can’t stomach that. He can’t face that. He can’t look his other daughter in the eyes as she dies, too. Because he knows it’ll happen. He knows. He’s positive of her fate, and he has to leave.
“…You have to take her. You can’t tell anyone, not even Maria. Tommy, you’re the only one I trust. If anyone else sees those bites on her, what’s under her skin…they’ll shoot her. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you. I swear.”
He cannot stop talking about how much he fears. Even once’s she’ll be gone and away from being his responsibility any longer, he still worries. That if anyone finds out before the Fireflies, they’ll shoot her. How even though Tommy would be the one with her, he still has to say it. Still has to make an effort to tell Tommy how fucking much she means to Joel. And no matter where he’d go, she’d still be with him. What happened to her would still follow him. If she was okay would still follow him. She’d follow him to the ends of the earth. Her jokes, her laughing, her attempts at whistling and her incessant questioning. It’d follow him everywhere.
“I’ll take her out at dawn.”
And he exhales like he’d held his breath their whole journey there. Tommy agrees, thank goodness. She’s not his responsibility. Mere hours from now he’ll be let go of that job. Of that kid. Of that little fly buzzing in his ear. He’ll be able to go wherever: back to Boston, a house in Jackson, maybe the little sheep farm he talked about. But she’ll be gone. That’s what matters.
But as relieved as that sigh sounds, it’s not complete relief. He doesn’t want to do this. “Do you give a shit about me or not?” “Of course I do.” How could she ask that? He doesn’t want to let her go. He wants to hold her into his side and let his heart feel what she’s so graciously opened up for him to feel. To have her and keep going together. To be a ‘we’. To have his second chance at fatherhood and to let it hit him with all the force of a tsunami. But it all ties back to failure. He will fail her. “I made this decision for your own good” because I’ll get you killed. Because I’ll fail. It’s what I’m good at. Because it’s all I know how to do. It’s the one thing I can do, perfectly. I’ll fail at protecting you. You’ll die, just like the rest of them. Just like her. And I cannot handle that. So I’m leaving you. Because I love you way too much to put you through that.
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“buffy wants a dad and giles hates himself so violently that he feels the ultimate act of paternal devotion is to refuse to be her dad” THANK YOU for reducing the parts of the early seasons esp that leave me screaming/crying/tearing my hair out/etc into an easily understandable statement. it's like. i love it in that its SO in character for the two of them that i can't imagine another way for them to be but also buffy wants it So Bad and my heart breaks for her and. AGH.
yeah and to elaborate on this thought: i am genuinely convinced that giles thinks buffy understands what he is doing. i am one hundred percent certain that this man is looking at the situation and going -- she knows how fucked up it would be if i was her dad, right? she knows that if i was her dad, i would be sending her out to die, and that would kill me, right? she knows that if i acknowledge her as my daughter, i would be instantly fucking pulling her out of this fight, because she doesn't deserve to be here and we both know that, but What She Needs is someone who is going to encourage her to do what is right for the World and a parent can't do that in this situation. a parent will always put their child first. and so in his head, actively Not Being Buffy's Dad is the greatest possible mercy and the greatest act of devotion that he can give to her without shattering both of them and also the world.
but the tragedy of it is that giles does not understand the way buffy sees it, and the way buffy sees it is that every time she reaches out and asks for him to be there, he flinches back and tells her that she needs to be stronger than she is. and what she learns from that is that her desire for giles to protect and comfort her is something that makes him uncomfortable, and something that he expects her to grow out of. he doesn't approve of her wanting to be his kid, and doesn't like the idea of being her dad, and obviously she's the one who kind of sucks for wanting to force him into a role that he has no interest in stepping into, right? obviously that's what he thinks of her, right?
and it is made SO MUCH WORSE by the fact that giles obviously cares about buffy! you would have to be completely detached from reality to see the way giles treats buffy and not pick up on the compassion. but the message that buffy gets from the paired statements of “i don’t want to be your dad” and “i care so much about you and would lay down my life for you” is that giles cares about her but doesn’t like how much she cares about him. which is true. however, because buffy is buffy, instead of following this thread to “giles hates himself,” she jumps to “giles thinks i am just Too Much in general.”
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