Title: Eleven Quid (Episode 00)
Author: TKodami
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel
Rating: 14+
Disclaimer: Neither the shows, nor the characters belong to me. I'm only mucking about in the Whedon sandbox.
Summary: After "Buffy vs. Dracula," the Master Vampire seems a little less dead than one would expect...
Notes: This is the prologue to an alternate version of Buffy S5. Nothing is crazy out-of-continuity yet. Look out for hints of things to come.
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It was done. Dracula was dead.
"Dracula wasn't entirely wrong about the Slayer's darkness," Buffy said, sitting opposite of Giles on the green leather sofa of his apartment-slash-Scooby Central-slash-bachelor pad-slash-self imposed exile form the workaday world. Her hands agitated in her lap. "It started with the enjoining spell." Spiritus, Animus, Sophus, Manus. That's when she had transformed from Buffy Summers, Teen Slayer into a feral beast who ran vampires to ground like wounded gazelle. As she described her new hunting ritual to her Watcher in minute detail, a dark shape settled on her face.
His fingers brushed the teapot, but refused to close around the smooth porcelain handle. "Yes, I see," he said, holding his body stock still.
Giles wanted so very badly to believe it was true. That the enjoining spell had catalyzed her recent changes. But when Buffy had described how she averted her first apocalypse for the fake Acathla-binding spell (what passed as Council-sanctioned grief counseling), he'd seen the same dark shape crowd her face. No love was lost between him and Angel, but Giles had shuttered inwardly after that tale. He felt a repetition of that shutter build in his chest. As in the library three years ago, the chilly resolve in Buffy's eyes—this is what had to be done, goes without saying—discomfited him.
One of many cultivated nervous reflexes kicked in, and he poured tea as a means to divert his gaze from the Slayer.
And if it had been Jenny at the edge of the portal, sword in his hands, the world waiting for him to slay love to save all? The uncanny thought dug greedy fingers into his past.
A memory was rooted up, unacknowledged except as one dry entry in his Watcher's Chronicle. That same evening two years ago. Too agitated by Buffy's admission to return to his house but unable to ring her (try the graveyard, probably Sunny Pines, Willow had told him—maybe Restfield Park, Xander had hedged), Giles shelved returns in the stacks in the Occult section. These books were claptrap mostly, tame reading for the students: spellbooks without components, farcical beastiaries, and enough vampire lore to scare the brighter ones into living like hermits until graduation.
He had run his fingers over the brittle spines of the books and found himself minutes later--against his better reason and years of Watcher training-- himself outside of the weapon's cage, testing the weight of Buffy's sword in his hands.
It was easy work to imagine Jenny in a gauzy white blouse at the lip of the portal, her mahogany eyes not grudging him the flinty steel. After several long imaginative pauses to fill in the gaps of the ancestry of Acathla, the mystical sword, the balance of Powers That Be with The Powers That Devour, Giles attempted a killing stroke. The edge of the blade skewered Wearther's Compendium of Misfortunate Happenings, Paupers' Edition. The crash sent up puffs of dust and loose sheaves, and fell around him like snowflakes. He hadn't been able to bear the weight of her responsibility.
"You haven't been my Watcher for some time."
Giles felt the acute loss of words as a similar weight bowed his head.
"No," he agreed.
She stood. Her body was tense, as though she was fighting down an impulse to flee. She paced in front of him, deliberate. Measured steps and hands tightening circles around each other--movements he'd expected, but hadn't seen for years, in the graveyards. Her. Nervous.
"Maybe if I could learn to control this thing, I could be stronger, I could be better." A long look at him seemed to snap Buffy from her hesitancy. She sat on couch again. Her face was inexplicably open, hopeful. "I can't do it without you."
A pause. "I need you to be my Watcher again."
Good lord, he wanted to say. He dismissed the urge to polish his glasses. Buffy started talking again to fill up the empty space in the conversation.
"You-you had something you wanted to say?" she stammered, at last opening up a space for Giles.
Mostly, he was aware of the words he wasn't saying to her. The speech he had prepared. Buffy, I wanted to tell you how proud I am at how far you've come. But the point in fact is: I have no more for you. This year, I have been as dangerous and ingrating as a freeloading chipped vampire. Do you remember the earthquake in January? The one I pooh-poohed to draw my little map of the commando's movements? You had said it was the end of the world, and your Watcher ignored your intuition. Were it not for a need to distract me from Riley's activities, you may not have pressured me to discover that we were barreling into the End Times with shit-eating grins. You may have needed me briefly to deal with that monstrosity Adam. But he's defeated. Your successful integration of Slaying and coursework at Sunnydale U has shown what an unnecessary cog I am.
If he was an even deeper kind of honest, he was still in fact a cog in the Slayer gearbox, the box marked: Giles, Superfluous, To Be Logged And/Or Destroyed at Archivist's Leave.
Buffy's hands fidgeted on the rough denim of her jeans. She didn't say anything. A slow tapping of her fingers, he realized, was begging him for completion of this ritual. He felt a tad shocked by this revelation. His Buffy lived in the action. What on Hellmouth's green earth could have given her the deep need to hear the words? Realizing in that instant that despite her ability to sweep all the hard lessons up into her Slayerness in such stride as to seem to waltz effortlessly into adulthood, she offered to him the mantle, if not the actual role, of mentor.
His self-reflexive speechifying smoldered for a moment, indulgent of the librarian's need to let the walls fall. He needed to reestablish the warmth he'd stamped out for this Godspeed, International Calling Rates Aren't As Steep As You'd think talk.
Giles fetched his winningest smile. "It's nothing," and reached for his teacup. "Yes Buffy," he said levelly. "Of course I'll be your Watcher."
They embraced before Buffy darted out of the door (family beckons, she'd said vaguely). It stung only a little to have an emptiness so suddenly acknowledged and just as inexplicably filled. Vampire brides and Dracula thrall aside, it had been, he reasoned, a good day.