I'm getting the feeling that my take on Wishverse may be kinda obscure, and specific... But I'm laying the groundwork now for bigger, more intimate, and more revealing things to come. It's felt really important to me to tackle the fact that Buffy and Giles in this universe *don't know each other yet* even though circumstance/curiosity/stubbornness has thrown them together. Please bear with me through the 'getting to know each other' phase, I felt like it wouldn't be fair or honest to skip straight past all that. I'm working on it, I promise.

The girl slept in the back seat all the way back into town. Dawn came as he drove, thin, golden and blue-black with the hard sharp edged shadows and endless, bottomless sky he'd come to associate with morning in south central California. Daylight meant that the curfew was lifted. It meant he could finally feed and find lodging for his new young charge. It meant he could go to the hospital and visit Jonathan and Amy, and hear Oz's version of the Master's end. Buffy hadn't told him much about it, he realized, not that he'd not exactly been in a frame of mind to hear it. It also meant that by societies regularized clock, it was now 'too early' for a drink, even though he wanted one, or several.

He'd thought he'd left those sorts of tendencies behind in his twenties, but he also never expected spend nearly three years in a place violently under demonic siege. Not as he was, disgraced, renounced, a voluntary dissenter and the forcibly ejected both at once. No support, no hope of relief. It had looked for a time as though he and the others would hold the line until all of them were gone, and then the dominoes would begin to fall further abroad until someone from the Council noticed and cared. He hadn't been able to guess what it would take. A string of towns under threat, maybe even Los Angeles. He didn't know. He couldn't guess. Even when he'd turned from the Council, he'd expected them to still care about the thousands of civilian souls living in any town under threat. He had been wrong.

He argued with himself regularly, especially after reading the news, or coming home from a funeral for one of the children at the school, which seemed to happen every few months. He asked himself if the Council would have listened to his warnings, if had remained among their number. Would he, and they, have been able to stop the Master rising, the Hellmouth seal unseating itself. If people would have been saved. If Xander, if Willow, if Jesse and Owen and Theresa…. If the children would all have lived? Or would it have been the same? If he hadn't gone to Sunnydale on his own harebrained scheme he never would have been in place to see the prophecies, after all. It was an unproductive argument that lead him nowhere.

But that was done now, that was all done. The Master was dead and his rats-nest of compatriots rooted out. By the strange, sullen young woman sleeping behind him.

He drove a few wide loops around the town, giving himself time to unwind, and to let the poor, exhausted girl sleep, and to give time for something besides the Denny's to open their doors. The streets were becoming less empty, at last. He drove past the usual spots, braced with a sick weight in his gut, but there were no parting grisly displays. The siege was over. He spotted a big, lumbering yellow school bus hulking its way toward the residential side of town, empty and ready. It still astonished him that so many families had stayed, but from what he'd heard, many parents were unwilling to believe, or had been unable to afford the necessity of abandoning an unsaleable house and buying a new one in another town.

He took the Slayer to the Toast Point, the only place in town that did a decent breakfast and a not altogether horrible pot of tea. She was a taciturn meal partner, but tidy and polite, not the perpetually starving, meat-craving creature he'd been taught a Slayer was. She had ordered oatmeal with raisins and coffee with cream. He ordered an omelette and wheat toast, though he couldn't tell in all honesty if he was hungry or not. Georgia, the pretty, dark haired waitress who flirted with him through his first six months as a regular before she realized he wasn't going to take up the offer, gave openly curious looks to both of them, but especially to the sullen blonde girl with the messy braid. Buffy stared her down in a show of easy dominance.

"What are your plans?" he asked, capturing her attention back from intimidating the waitress, "Back to Chicago now? Or will you stay for a bit and investigate the, um, local flora and fauna?"

"I dunno. This was gonna to be a one-off, but there's something freaky about this place. It's like there's something else I'm supposed deal with here. I think I need to stay and see what. If there really is something, I guess." Buffy was frowning down at her oatmeal as if embarrassed by her confusion. "Anyway, I bet Reggie won't mind having a break from me for a while."

"Yes, I must say I'm a bit surprised that your Watcher doesn't travel with you. That's not the protocol I was taught, and I don't believe it's what Regina was taught either."

"Times change," said Buffy with a brisk, bristling look, "I can handle working without a minder. I'm not some naive kid."

"No, I can see that. In any event, I should be glad of the assistance. I'm not at all sure what's going to happen to the balance of power around here, in the aftermath. And I believe our little team is at the very end of its resources."

"I'll need a place to stay. You have any thoughts about that, Giles?" this was a challenge, a goad, but of course also a serious question.

"There aren't a lot of options, I'm afraid, with the way the tourist trade dried up these last few years, but there are a couple of motels. Or you're welcome to stay with me, if you feel comfortable with the idea. They often do, our little band I mean. The flat has become something of a headquarters away from headquarters. Which I supposed is why it's often something of a tip, but it's comfortable enough."

The girl, Buffy watches him. He can feel the weight of her assessment, her skepticism, the assumptions that she is trying to make or unmake about middle aged men who offer to house young women.

It is quite true that nearly all of his team have stayed with him at one time or another, even the other adults of their number, sometimes in groups and sometimes singly, and all wholly platonically. At least in his part. He wasn't always sure what the kids got up to when the rest were asleep, and as it isn't his business, he never tried to find out. It had been war, or siege, or hell. Sometimes it wasn't feasible to move if their work stretched past nightfall. Sometimes there was an emergency. Sometimes none of them wanted to face another night after a death announcement alone with their memories. Xander used to stay often, the start of the habit. Oz, too, after full moons in the library cage. Amy, too, after her mother ran off without a word. He was their head of house, their camp counselor as Jonathan put it. He didn't mind, he knew that even though he sometimes felt rather claustrophobically surrounded, it was better to have the company.

He thinks of all of this while she deliberated, and decided that trying to explain would do no good. This young woman has not been shown much kindness, he can tell. She would likely struggle to believe in gestures without ulterior motivation.

"Okay," she said, forcedly casual, "I guess I'll stay with you. Just because Reggie didn't send me with a lot funds. So we're clear."

"Alright. I understand. And if you would rather stay elsewhere, I can certainly afford to put you up."

"No. Your my ride here, right? And like, my watcher in situ. If you don't mind a couch surfer, it's fine."

"Certainly. I'm well used to it by now." He said blandly.

"Fine."

'In situ' was a surprising phrase from this rough, half feral Slayer. Though perhaps not, once he thought about it. Her main companionship these last few years of her tenure were likely to have been her Watcher. Or Watchers, rather, he assumed from the brief conversation he'd had with Regina. And he knew intimately well what Watchers were like.

"Are you going to let Regina know your plans to stay?" he asked. He wondered how formally he would end up responsible for her. He felt the urge to warn Buffy that the Council would likely take against any lengthy association between her and him, informal or otherwise. He guessed that she was contrary enough that such a warning would be as good as push towards open defiance from her. While he didn't disagree on principle with angering the council, her dependent position was far more precarious than his.

"Yeah," said Buffy, "But not right now."

He accepted this with the doubt that it was quite obviously due, but decided not to comment. What he remembered of Regina Pitcairn Burns from the old days was an abrasive, even batteringly determined young woman who seemed to believe that her capacious memory quick instinct for strategy were the same thing as infallible correctness in all situations. She was widely admired by the instructors and widely hated by her fellow trainees, which had only augmented her sense of being in the only right voice in a chorus of wrong-headed doubters. With Buffy's obvious fury and cynicism right in front of him, he could only imagine the explosive working relationship that Watcher and Slayer enjoyed, or failed to.

In the light of day, the flat looked particularly shambleized. He hadn't even bothered to put away the summoning spell ingredients from the night before. Housekeeping had fallen to low priority, recently, and this hadn't bothered him. Looked at now the haphazard piles of books and papers on every available surface, the abandoned tea cups and crumb strewn plates, the abandoned ceremonial bowl and burnt offering, acrid herbaceous smell still lingering, the spilled papers still littered across the floor, none of it was a welcoming sight. It did not look like an appropriate place to house a Slayer.

"Well. Sorry about the state of the place. It's gotten away from me lately. Let me just…" he gestured widely at the disarray and set off to make a dent in it. The crockery could be taken away at least, and the spellcraft materials put back in their cupboard, the papers gathered and set aside. He moved stacks of books off the coffee table and the dining table, and found that he had nowhere else to put them, so they joined other stacks in dark corners and on the margins of the staircase. "When the Library at the school isn't a possibility, we all come here, you see. Research and regrouping. And even a group of highly responsible teachers and young people can make, it turns out, an enormous amount of mess," he said, as he gathered up and disposed of forgotten trash from the last meeting, which he found on various end tables.

"It's not that bad," said Buffy, "I've seen worse."

She had gravitated to the sofa and the television propped up beside the hearth and was flipping through channels. So she's a teenager after all, he thought, not unkindly.

Upstairs, he quickly stripped the bed and put on fresh, clean white sheets from the blanket chest, and got the spare pillows out of the bottom of the armoire. He tidied up his abandoned water glasses and mugs of tea from the bedside table, and made a quick glance around to be sure that the small, blue and yellow tiled bath off the loft was presentable. It wasn't in his nature or his upbringing to leave any woman to the unevenly sprung mercies of the sofa, and this was an even more deserving guest who had earned more from him than sheer habitual politeness. For however long she stayed, he hoped to make her comfortable. He, all of them, owed her a very great debt.

He glanced down at the girl from the loft balcony, a slight, lounging figure, a sleek, golden crown. He thought, as he had intermittently every since the others began staying with him, that it was awkward that the bedroom didn't have any real privacy from rooms below. It made things complicated and jarringly fastidious with female guests. Yet, conversely, it helped, too. The openness of the loft gave it the communal feeling that made the friendly, chaste, often necessary 'camping out' in the flat so possible.

The feeling of openness and exposure was actually rather repressive to even private moments of romance, he had discovered in the early days with sweet, strange Jenny. She had complained of feeling on display, even with the lights low and the doors locked - those being the days before constant expectation of crashing emergency. She had appreciated it though, later and in a different context, when they often enough had one or more of the kids caught by curfew dozing below. She had liked the proprietary den mother sense of his and her watchful resting above, clothed and listening and luxuriating, the maternal figure and the paternal figure of the troop. She liked to walk up to the balcony and look down at them when they visited, peacefully settled and safe. Usually it was Xander, usually Willow and Xander, the most determined of their number, and the most without comfort at their own homes.

He'd found it cloying at the time, or something like that. Something that unsettled him, anyway. He had said something pointed and worried once to Jenny about playing happy families in the middle of a war zone. Jenny had looked at him with clear disappointment and told him that maybe that's when they needed it most. He later spent a lot of time wishing away his past reserve, but of course by then it had been too late.

The flat is cozy, ensconced in thick walls and creamy plaster, sunk within a walled and trellissed and gated, and palm and lemon tree shaded courtyard. One must know it's there to come to it, and once inside one feels welcomed and separated, like within an artistic retreat or a grand monk's cell. When he first decided to purchase it, it seemed not like a bachelor pad in the rank sense but like a place he could picture spending time in solitary contemplation, away from the jarring prospect of the High School, and the frightful possibility of a mystical convergence zone. None of that had worked out as he had pictured but the little place did feel secure, and now very well lived in.

He showed Buffy around the flat, the tidied loft that where she was free to rest, the kitchen, the big bath in the back, the weapons chest by the door if she should need it. Then he left her to it, with her small battered backpack and instructions to rest or to make herself at home. He desperately needed some time away from the close, familiar place, and from the stranger he'd been made to host.

He was grateful. They had been freed from the demon tyrant. He didn't feel freed. He felt tremendous pressure solidify around him, like a front of weather pushing him down, but also from the inside, pushing on his ribs.

Buffy intended to stay for a while, it was clear. She stewed the things from her bag across his bed. She poked around in his pantry and his bookshelves and his weapons chest. She did hours-long patrols of the whole town, as far as he could tell. She would slip in quietly in the small hours of the morning, smelling of night air and damp turf and sweat and creep past his couch to shower, and then back past him up to the loft. She used his shampoo. She tended to leave damp towels wadded in the sink. She always slept late. She didn't grocery shop for herself, but added things to the list on his fridge, like pop tarts and sugary breakfast cereals and low fat yogurt cups (no fruit at the bottom style, she wrote, he would have told her that she was more likely to get what she wanted if she did the shopping herself or at least went along, but she was asleep in the loft when he left for the school in the mornings and he still was in the habit of doing the errands below coming home in the evenings, while it was still light). She claimed that she had alerted Regina and obtained her permission to remain in Sunnydale, but he harbored doubts. Giles felt sure that the situation could not go on very long the way it was, it simply could not.

That first day after the Master was slain, he visited Jonathan and Amy in the hospital. Oz was still there, and Jonathan's small, round, teary eyed mother.

Amy had been bitten but she had staked her attacker quickly and the blood loss hadn't been bad. She would be discharged that day or the next, they had merely wanted to keep an eye on her. She sat upright in bed and spoke to him bravely about the final battle while Oz held her hand. She had been waiting, it seemed, for him to show up so she could talk about it, expiating triumph and fear.

She said that now that it was all over at last, maybe she would go away for college after all. Amy confessed that she had only taken UC Sunnydale's acceptance because she couldn't imagine abandoning them to the fight, but there had been other options, other schools. In places that weren't full of ghosts, she didn't say, but the three of them looked at each other and thought it, feeling those ghosts around them. Giles promised to help her get her transfer in any way he could, if there's what she decided on when the time came.

In Jonathan's room things were more quiet, more tense. He had been hurt fairly badly and was subdued and slightly sedated. Giles made small talk with Donna, his mother, in the room with Jonathan and then she asked to speak to him in the hall. She said that she knew, she knew something was wrong with this town. She knew her her son was a good boy. He was loyal to his friends. He wanted to protect them. She just wished that he would stop, stop getting in fights, stop staying out at all hours, stop hanging on to Amy and Oz because they loved each other, not Jonny, and to them he would never quite come first.

"It's going to be different now," Giles assured Donna, "Things have changed. I have- that is, you should trust that there's every reason to think that things will be much safer. For all of us."

He said also that Jonathan was a young man now, and an honorable one with friends who looked out for him. That was something to be proud of, and that he personally was very proud of the boy.

He thought involuntarily of Xander, of whom he had thought and said similar things. That he'd had friends who loved him, that he'd been loyal and honorable, that he, Giles, was proud. Giles meant those words equally for both boys. He was glad that he was not saying them to Jonathan's mother at a funeral. Maybe he could convince Jonathan to move on as well, now that the Master's rule was over, and then he would be safe enough that Giles would never have to.

After the hospital, he remembered his other duties, and phoned the school.

He notified the front desk of his absence, called it due to illness, and left messages for the two other teachers in the circle, Jenny Callander, who was very cool to him these days, and Dr. David Gregory of Biology who had turned out to be an steadfast ally after Giles had saved him from a giant praying mantis creature three and a half years before. He sent out a coded all clear and indicated that it was time for the whole group of survivors to meet, the next day after school. The defense club, it's euphemistic name, was called to meet in the Library after last bell, very important. Jenny and David knew how to contact all the graduated students who still helped out and the ones who were still in school would see the notice on the appropriate cork board. Candie, the improbably named woman at the front desk, had never been very warm or sympathetic to him, but she did have a fair idea of what was going on. She asked if it was good news. Giles said that it was, the best, he hoped the very best.

When he got back home that evening, after a long time spent in thought, trying to absorb all that had happened, Buffy was awake. Hadn't been sure if she had slept, or simply waited out the hours, but he guessed she had. She looked younger than she had the day before. Her face was less of a stiff mask, glaring and more a wary alertness. She was rather pretty, he realized, with some surprise. She had a sweet, germanic round face and big blue-green eyes and a mobile little mouth, and a healthy rose bloom on her cheeks. When she didn't glower she looked alarmingly young and doll like, or like a dreamy eyed, tender girl in a 16th or 17th century Dutch portrait. He had enough sense to realize that this was likely at least part of why she did glower so solidly, in awareness and defense against the impression of the sweet, wholesome smallness of her.

Buffy wanted to know about the hellmouth. She asked to see it, if it was a specific place that you could go look at. She said that the Cleveland one wasn't actually a place, and it hadn't impressed her. All hype and no follow through, she said. But it felt different here.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm being a very poor host. I left you alone all day, I should have asked…" he had known when he left her that he should have, but she needed her rest, and he hadn't been able to face playing tour guide, not yet.

"I napped," she said, cool and indifferent, "It's fine."

"But I think I must disappoint you tonight. I'm exhausted, I'm afraid. I'll make dinner and then I need to rest. I don't believe I'm safe to patrol just now."

"So it is a place that you can go to? Not just a supposed invisible whammy on the city?" Buffy asked, doggedly curious.

"Actually I'd say it's both of those. And you can't exactly go to the hellmouth, but I can show you the place where it opens, if and when it does. Thankfully it is currently sealed. Not much to look at when it is closed, but as I say, I'm extremely grateful that that's the case, and may it ever be so."

"Okay. Tomorrow then," she said, looking faintly annoyed but her voice was calm enough.

She offered to go get dinner out somewhere and save him the bother, and Giles had to explain that there was a sundown curfew, started six months before. It wasn't likely to be lifted immediately because the people who had set the precautions hadn't understood what was going on, exactly, and weren't likely to understand what wasn't going right away, either. It made patrol difficult, if the SPD was also patrolling. It also meant that stores and restaurants didn't stay open. Going out to lunch had replaced going out to dinner for the young and dating crowd, according to Amy.

"This is a hell of a screwed up town," said Buffy, absorbing this with distaste.

"Yes, I would have to agree."

Buffy went out to patrol after dinner, promising she knew how to duck cops if need be. He thought things were likely to be unusually quiet for a while, in the wake of the Master's demise, but she argued that there were always scavengers. She said that she was wired, she wanted to fight something.

She offered with an awkward and gruff politeness to take the couch later, she didn't mind. He got the sense that she was not altogether comfortable staying with him. Buffy would probably rather stay in a motel, independant and secure. He wondered why she didn't ring up her Watcher and request the funds to do so. He wondered why she was so intent on staying on with him, where she obviously didn't feel quite welcome, in a town she clearly didn't like rather than going home to Watcher where she wouldn't have to deal with either.

"Of course not, the loft is yours for as long as you have need of it," he said with a graciousness he didn't entirely feel, "I still have my manners, if nothing else."

A time would come, not long from that first night, when he would begin to regret that offer.

Buffy was distinctly unimpressed with the location of the hellmouth.

"This is a high school," she said when he went to meet in the Sunnydale High parking lot. The gathering would begin shortly.

Buffy was dressed more casually than her battle gear from the day before, an oversized plaid shirt and some kind of black undershirt and trousers. Her long hair was tied up in a heavy looking looped up, gleaming knot at the back of her head. Her face was fresh and clean and unmade up, and once again set with challenging skepticism. She looked convincingly like one of the ordinary students, even the conscious cynicism simply added veracity.

"Yes it is. Come on, I'll escort you."

"I thought we were going to look at a mystical convergence, not playing 'take your Slayer to work day.'"

"We are going to look at it," he said shortly, "I did tell you there wasn't much to see while it's safely closed."

He led her to the Library from the side entrance, avoiding most of the busiest places in the school, and most particularly the front office window. He held open one of the swinging double doors for her, and pointed out the patch of floor beside the study table that had been cracked open when the Master rose and later repaired.

"You're kidding me," she said, peering at the floor.

"I assure you, I am not."

She stomped a combat booted foot on one of the obviously replaced boards, and then shuffled over the area. When this apparently yielded no information, she sat down on the floor and hovered her hands over the spot, frowning with fierce concentration. She sat in near spell-cast silence for a long, thinking stretch and then shrugged, and got back to her feet.

"Okay, yeah, there's something. It doesn't exactly scream 'vortex of cataclysmic evil' but it's not friendly, either." Buffy seated herself on the edge of the study table and leaned back on her palms, staring around at the rest of the library. "They really built a fucking high school on top of the mouth to hell."

"Yes, they did."

"And you just happened to get a job here."

"I didn't just happen to, I had a tip from... a friend who had convincing reason to know. That there was an unattended convergence, and that there was a position open for a Librarian at the school. It seemed appropriately unassuming. Though I did waste months looking for the particular spot when it turned out to be right under my nose. Convenient, in a way."

"Not convenient," she said, refusing to joke, "Creepy. I don't see how you can work here."

"I didn't think I could either, just after we found out. But you get you get use to it," he said, thoughtful, painful, tinged with recollection of things that even more be didn't want to confront. He put his hands in his pockets and blinked hard. "One thing I've learned is that people can get used to all kinds of things, with time and necessity."

Buffy stared hard at him from her perch. Her expression was surprisingly soft, he was tempted to call it sympathy. Or recognition, he thought, as she nodded slowly.

"I should make tea before the meeting," he said forcibly lifting himself from the growing mood they were sinking into, "come in to the office, you can pick out what kind."