Note: Some of the dialogue from this chapter is taken straight from a companion piece entitled "The Mayor's Legacy." If you didn't read it, the early morning caller was Spike.

Part Two

It was only a short drive to the hospital, but the uncomfortable silence that had fallen over the group in Rupert's cab made it seem very distant indeed. Dawn tried to break the stillness by singing, "The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah. The ants go marching one by–" After Anya and Joan glared her into silence, however, no one said anything further until they arrived at the hospital.

When they got to the hospital, Anya strode into the building without a second glance while Joan gave him an apologetic shrug. "Neither Dawn nor I have our wallets on us." Rupert shrugged himself, and then paid for the cab. He fought down a surge of annoyance when he realized that nobody had waited for him.

After paying the cabby, Rupert quickly jogged up to the emergency entrance to join his companions. Before he could call out to them, however, a security guard grabbed his arm. "Woah, slow down Mr. Giles! You aren't going to do your head any good by running."

"What-- You know my name?" Well this was unexpected. "Can you tell m–"

The guard wasn't listening to him. Instead, he was talking into a microphone on his lapel with great excitement. "Hey, guess what? Mr. Giles is here!" There was a brief pause, during which the guard looked Rupert over. "No, I don't think that will be necessary; he's walking under his own steam this time." This time? How often did he come into the emergency room? "Um, yeah. I'll tell him." The guard turned back to Rupert and smiled. "Why don't you sit down, Mr. Giles. Jorge will be out in a moment with a wheelchair for you."

"But I don't need that apparatus," Rupert objected hotly. "You said yourself that I was walking under my own steam,' whatever that means..."

"Head injuries are tricky, Mr. Giles. Nobody knows that better than you!" He did? How would he know that? "Besides, you've remained healthy and whole for months now, and people have missed you."

The hospital staff missed him? What did that mean? Before he could ask, a short, stocky Latino man approached him. "Mr. Giles," he exclaimed happily. "It's been a while! How many times were you hit on the head this time?"

"I wasn't, um, none. I haven't been hit on the head at all... to my knowledge..."

Both men looked at him in surprise. The Hispanic orderly asked the question. "Then why are you here?"

"Um," Rupert stalled, suddenly realizing how stupid he was going to sound. "Well, you see, I, uh, seem to have lo- lost my memory."

The guard laughed heartily while the orderly pushed him down into the wheelchair. Within moments, Jorge was whisking him down the halls. He soon passed his fiancée and his fellow amnesia sufferers, but the orderly refused to stop for them. Everywhere he went, hospital personnel called out to him in delight, and they all asked about his head. Rupert wondered how many times he had come here before. Apparently owning a magic shop was a hazardous proposition.

Thanks to Jorge's skillful driving, Rupert found himself at the nurse's desk in no time. A large, middle-aged woman sat behind the desk, frowning at all and sundry. As soon as she saw Rupert, however, she broke into a beatific smile, one that slashed twenty years from her appearance. "Mr. Giles! We've been quite concerned about you! You've never been away from us for so long before." Rupert gave the nurse a sickly smile, wondering how he should respond to her enthusiasm. She pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing. "Let's see... You were mugged in the park, you didn't see your attackers, you were hit on the head repeatedly, and you believe yourself concussed. That about cover it?"

"No!" The nurse looked at him oddly, so he tried to quiet his voice. "Um, what I mean is, I wasn't mugged. At least, I don't think I was..." She was staring at him in disbelief now, and it was making him edgy. "I woke up in my shop with my fiancée and some customers. All of us appear to have lost our memories. I, I have no idea who I am, or what may have caused this, uh, memory loss."

The nurse frowned in confusion. "It sounds to me like the quantitative effect from multiple head injuries is finally starting to catch up with you. We did warn you about that, Mr. Giles." She frowned so fiercely at him that he felt like a naughty child. It made him even more nervous than he had been.

"Yes, but, uh, that sh- shouldn't have affected anyone else." He felt familiar fingers dancing along his arm, and realized that the others must have caught up with him. Or at least Anya had. "Here are my fellow sufferers. You, you can ask them, ah, yourself."

The nurse scowled at them, and then ordered them to follow her. She crowded the entire group into a small room and told them to wait for the doctor. Alexander and Willow jumped up on the examining table and began swinging their legs; the busty blonde girl stood beside them, trying to overcome her shyness so that she might talk to the redhead. Dawn began gliding around the room on the doctor's wheeled chair, bumping into walls and barely missing the adults in the room. Joan paced the room like a panther, picking up stray objects and setting them down without looking at them. Rupert bit down a scream, and wondered whether he associated with these people on a regular basis. He hoped that they were normally less irritating.

Hoping to regain his composure, Rupert pulled a chair into the corner–away from the younger people–and sat down. Anya promptly deposited herself upon his lap. Before he could complain, she sweetly told him, "There aren't enough chairs for us all." Rupert was annoyed... even more so when he felt his body responding to Anya's nearness. This earned him a seductive smile and a slight wiggle. He leaned in towards her ear and gave a nearly inaudible groan.

Although Rupert should have been glad when the doctor walked in–this was a dangerous game they were playing, after all–he had to bite down a curse. He sent up a fervent prayer that the mystery would be solved quickly; he wanted to go home and reacquaint himself with his beautiful intended.

~*~*~

It didn't go quickly. Not at all. After nearly four hours of poking and prodding, the doctor released them with a shrug and an admittance of ignorance. Rupert wondered if his real self hated emergency rooms as much as he did, given the fact that he apparently came here on a regular basis.

The trip hadn't been a complete loss, however. One of the interns recognized Joan; apparently her mother had died nearly a year before. A search for Joyce Summers' medical records revealed that Joan's name was actually Buffy, she and Dawn were indeed sisters, and the girls had a place to stay. Their address, somewhere on Revello Drive, matched the one on Tara's (for such was the name of the busty blonde) student identification card, so everyone deduced that they must be best friends. Rupert wondered at the wistful looks that Tara and Willow gave each other following this announcement.

Eventually they broke up into groups and got into three separate cabs. Alexander and Willow went to the address on the boy's driver's license; Buffy, Dawn, and Tara went to Revello Drive; and Rupert took Anya to the address listed on his resident alien card. They didn't speak during the cab ride, rather spending the entire time kissing and groping each other. It couldn't have been more than two miles from the hospital to their destination, but Rupert felt that it must have been the longest car ride of his life. (The fact that he could only remember two such rides did not decrease his certainty in the least.)

When the cab driver finally stopped, Rupert shoved a fistful of bills into the man's hand and jumped out. Anya immediately objected. "You gave him too much money. He should give some of it back!"

Rupert was annoyed. She was the one who had seemed to be in such a hurry. "Yes, but the man deserves a tip, darling."

"Not that much," she snapped. "Take one extra dollar for yourself, and give me all of the rest," she told the cab driver. The man snorted, did as he was told, and sped away. Rupert suspected that it wasn't altogether accidental when the cab went through a puddle of standing water and splashed water upon them.

Anya began screaming at the departing cabby, which caused Rupert to sigh. He began patting down his pockets to find his housekeys, and came across a large piece of paper in the inside pocket of his jacket. Hoping that it might contain more information about his identity, he pulled it out... and received a shock. It was an airplane ticket on Global Airlines, going from Sunnydale, California (apparently his current location) to Los Angeles, and then on to Heathrow airport. The ticket was one-way, so he evidently had no intention of returning... even though he had a home, a business, and a fiancée here in the United States. Why would he do that? He certainly wouldn't go anywhere now, when he was so uncertain of everything (he had missed his flight in any case), but it made him question the conclusions that he had already reached. Was he a happy man or not?

Anya interrupted his ruminations. She came up behind him and slipped her arms around his chest, causing him to quickly put the ticket back in his pocket. "What do you have there?"

"Um, nothing. Just some, uh, paperwork for our, our store. You were right," he added with forced cheer, "I am apparently the one in charge of keeping the books."

His voice sounded horribly false to Rupert, but Anya apparently didn't notice. Instead, she turned his head around to give him a deep and lingering kiss. "How about getting that door open, Rupie?"

"Rupie," Rupert snorted in irritation. "I'm quite certain that you don't call me Rupie'." Anya answered him with another mind-blowing kiss. "On second thought," Rupert said breathlessly, "I suspect that I permit you to call me anything you like." He opened the door, and conversation was soon at an end.

~*~*~

They made love until the sun began to rise, and yet Rupert felt that he didn't know anything more about his fiancée than he had when they woke up the previous evening. Other than the fact that she was extremely skilled in the bedroom. His last smug thought before he drifted off to sleep was that they were both highly experienced. That unexplained airplane ticket suggested that their relationship was not without its problems, but obviously their sex life was not at the root of their difficulty. At the moment, he couldn't believe that they were anything but perfectly happy; the languid comfort of spooning up behind her felt very much like contentment to him.

Rupert could not have been asleep for more than five minutes when the shrill ring of an old-fashioned telephone woke him up. "Let the machine get it," he sleepily muttered when Anya started to get up.

"How do you know you have a machine? It might be important, Rupert. Maybe one of the others have gotten back their memory." Very sensible of her. Rupert decided that Anya could handle it and that he could go back to sleep. Except he soon found that he couldn't, because Anya was shaking him. "It's for you, and it's not one of the others. Some English guy, like you."

"Please, Anya, there is no reason to shake me that hard."

"Well, I want to know what's going on," she told him firmly. "If you think that it is alright to have your rude friends calling at all hours of the morning, you are very much mistaken!"

"Darling, please stop shaking me. I don't know any more than you do." She humphed at him, and he felt an irrational hatred of whomever was on the other end of the line. He had been happy and sated a few minutes ago, cuddling up with the woman he evidently loved, and now this same woman was shoving him out of his warm bed to talk to one of his "rude friends." This had better be good. He grabbed hold of the receiver, and tried to put a civil tone in his voice. "Um, hello. This is, uh--" Christ! What was his full name again? Oh, right. "Is Rupert Giles."

"'Bout bloody time," was his only answer. The caller did indeed have a British accent, but one that indicated a lower social class than his own. Rupert wondered how he knew that. In any case, Anya was correct; the caller was very rude. "Listen, I need you to bail me out of jail."

Rupert wasn't sure what he had expected, but that wasn't it. He paused for a long moment, trying to gather his sleepy thoughts into some kind of order. First things first: he needed to determine who this man was, and how much he knew about Rupert and his companions. He wondered how to phrase the question delicately, without giving too much away. He drew a blank, and then decided that he was too tired to think of anything subtle. "Who are you, and why exactly would I want to get you out of jail?"

"C'mon, Giles," the strange man whined.

"Giles?" Well, that was odd. Why would this man call him by his last name, as if Rupert were a public school student? Again, he decided that bluntness was his best method for solving this mystery. "Shouldn't you call me Mr. Giles? Or are we friends?"

Rupert had hoped to gather information with that question, but the incarcerated man was apparently quite insulted by it. "Fine," he spat viciously, "you're right. We aren't friends, Rupes. But your Slayer is in my debt, which means that YOU owe me. And I'm collecting. Today. Drag your poncy arse down to the police station right now and get me out of here!"

Nothing about that sentence made much sense to Rupert. Slay her? What the hell did that mean? He decided to pursue the simplest matter first. "Um, I'm afraid that, uh, I'm not fa- familiar with the debt that you mentioned."

Now the man sounded very angry. "Glory beating the hell out me, Dawn up on a tower, me saving her while the Slayer took a swan dive... any of this ringing a bell, Watcher?"

Rupert's head was spinning now. Dawn was the teenager he had met this evening, so obviously she wasn't just some random customer. But that didn't explain the repeated use of the words "slay her," a term that sent a vague thrill of fear through him. He took a deep breath and tried to temporize. "Ahhh, not really. But, you see–"

"Oh, I see, Watcher," said the man, apparently in a fury. "I see *perfectly* well, you wanker." Wanker? Where did this lower-class sod get off calling him a wanker? "And you are going to pay, I can promise you that! Someday I *will* get this chip out of my head, and on that very day I'm going to rip your throat out. Count on it, mate."

Rupert was finding out new things about himself all the time. At that moment, he learned that he didn't take threats well. At all. "Is that a fact," he asked the man coldly. "I must confess that I am rather looking forward to that encounter. Do look me up after you get out of prison." Before the rude little bugger could respond, Rupert slammed the phone down on its hook.

Rupert felt the anger coming off him in waves, but Anya was oblivious to it. "So," she asked brightly, "what did you learn about us?"

"Excuse me?"

"That man who called," Anya began, "he asked for you. He obviously knew you. He must know things about you. Maybe he knows things about all of us! So, what did you learn?"

Rupert felt a flush of shame as he realized that Anya was right. He had had the perfect opportunity to learn more about them, and he had allowed his anger to distract him. Still, it hadn't been an utter waste. He ran the conversation back through his mind, trying to glean what information he could. "He kept saying slay her; I don't know what that means. And he called me Watcher,' which doesn't sound particularly nice, I must admit." This brought a lecherous grin to Anya's face, and Rupert couldn't help returning it. "He mentioned someone named Glory, who is evidently quite violent, and that he saved Dawn, presumably the girl from the shop. And he was, as you said, quite rude."

"So, is he coming over? Can we talk to him and learn more?"

"Um, well, that might be a bit of a problem," Rupert admitted sheepishly. "He was calling from jail, you see, and wanted me to bail him out."

"That's good," Anya declared. "That means he'll stay where he is until we've had a few more hours of sleep. And perhaps a bit more getting to know your fiancé' time."

Rupert grinned, and then kissed her, slowly and languorously. "That, my dear, is a capital plan."

"What capital," she teased. "I never know what you're talking about. Loo, shag, brolly, what the hell is all that?"

"What," Rupert asked solemnly, though the twinkle in his eyes gave him away. "There's no way that you could remember me saying any of those words."

"Oh, go to sleep, you brolly," she mumbled affectionately.

Rupert chuckled happily, gathered Anya into his arms, and drifted back to sleep.