Strictly Library
by L. Inman
Buffy paused at the door of the school to pick leaves out of her hair. There had been a particularly exercising tussle between herself, a vampire, and a hedge ten minutes ago, and the adrenaline rush hadn't quite worn off yet. She dropped the leaves along with a few blond strands over the doorstep; watching them drift down to the cement (worn smooth by many feet), she came out of the battle haze enough to reflect on the nostalgia that was supposed to be taking hold: senioritis, affection for every brick of this previously loathsome building, arms flung round the shoulders of classmates who had previously meant nothing. They meant something now, but it was the old something, the maybe-this-is-the-end-of-the-world something, not the simple sentiment of approaching graduation.
Well, if she had anything to say about it, her fellow seniors would live to be nostalgic. Buffy went ahead inside.
The lights were on in the library, but then, she knew they would be; Giles's jalopy was parked in its usual place outside. Which was why she'd bothered to come in. Which was why she had come to check in the first place.
Which was probably why she was also suddenly nervous. Suppose he said no? A secret part of her thought that would probably be a relief.
She peeped in the door window before going in. He was there, seated at the table, in shirtsleeves with his jacket draped carelessly over the back of another chair, surrounded by books. When she opened the door it was to a silence as complete as the one in the halls, except for the human presence of the man bent frowningly over a manuscript, his finger following the text down the page, a pencil in his left hand.
Buffy's sneaker squeaked on the tile, and Giles looked up. "Buffy," he said. "I didn't expect you this evening." They hadn't done much night training in a while; it had been awkward since the Council fired Giles. For having "a father's love" for her. Buffy still tasted the bile, all the more because of the dent that disaster had put in their mutual trust.
Buffy quirked a shoulder. "I just…dropped in." She gestured back out the door. "I saw your car."
"Ah."
"Translating?"
"Yes."
"Cool."
His eyes narrowed shrewdly. "What's up?"
"Nothing," Buffy said, with a nonchalant pout. She wandered across to the table and toyed lightly with the corner of a particularly heavy tome. "I just got through with a little bit of slayage and thought I'd drop in on you, y'know, since you're still here."
"Aha," Giles said, picking up his pencil again. "So I ask again: what's up?"
Buffy heaved a sigh and flopped delicately on the arm of the chair across from him. "Oh…I don't know…there's just…." She stopped. Working up to this had sounded so much easier in her head.
Giles raised an eyebrow, which didn't help.
"See," Buffy said awkwardly, "I'm planning to have a nice romantic night with Angel for, you know, prom…."
Now both Giles's eyebrows went up, but it seemed more from mere idle curiosity than from the deep mistrust and skepticism Buffy had worried about.
"…Because, you know, things have been rough lately and I wanted to give him a normal romantic night after all these misfires, so I thought, here's a built-in date with the prom and everything, flowers and dressing up and dancing, and—barring any emergency slaying—a quiet time where we don't even have to talk, just have fun like, like normal people…." She was starting to dry up.
Giles said mildly, "Yes. Yes, I expect so."
"But…there's a problem," Buffy said.
"Indeed," Giles said, in that British interrogative that was never quite an interested question. Damn him, he was probably making fun of her behind that sober look. But she had bigger fish to fry.
She blurted: "I don't know how to dance."
He cocked his head and blinked at her. "Of course you know how to dance. I've seen you, at the Bronze. Countless times."
"That's…that's just—cool dancing," Buffy said, undulating her shoulders as if to a heavy beat, by way of demonstration. "I mean, the old-fashioned kind."
The man's mouth quirked. Dammit, he was laughing at her. "Buffy," he said, "I hardly think they'll be playing music suitable for ballroom dancing at your prom. I think you're safe."
"No, but—you see, I was planning to do more dancing after the prom." Buffy hitched her shoulders up half-defensively. "The kind he knows how to do. The old kind."
"Well," Giles said, "there are several varieties of the 'old kind' of dancing—especially considering Angel's age—and I don't know which you mean. If it's a minuet you're wanting to learn, I can't…oh dear God. You want me to teach you how to dance."
"We interrupt this program for a special 'duh'!"
He leveled a steely look at her over his glasses. "No," he said, and picked up his pencil.
"Oh, come on. Giles, please."
"And anyway," he added with pique, looking up from his pretense at working, "how do you even know I know how to dance?"
"Come on," Buffy said, rolling her eyes. "You can't not know how to dance, not with that whole Cary Grant thing you've got going."
He leveled another look at her, but she thought he might be softening. "Flattery will get you nowhere."
She scrambled off the chair and bent to lay her hands on the table before him, in an attitude of prayer. "Then how about shameless begging?"
He made a show of taking off his glasses and inspecting them for smudges. But he couldn't keep doing that long enough to shake off her persistent pleading stare, so he finally lowered them to the table and looked at her directly.
"Don't you think," he ventured in a hopeful voice, "it would be more romantic to have Angel teach you himself?"
Buffy sighed. "I've already tried that game. It backfires. Please?" she said. "All I want to know how to do is just the basic slow dance. That's it. No frills, or anything else. Very…genteel. No tangoes or anything."
"Makes me very glad I don't know the tango," Giles replied, with a snort that Buffy knew for a veiled laugh.
"Pleeze?"
He finally tossed his head aside with a look of longsuffering—victory, she thought, such as it was—and murmured, "I may have some suitable recordings in my office."
"Goody," she said, jumping up.
Giles got up much more slowly. "Why do I think this is a recipe for utter ignominy?"
"Hey, watch it," Buffy said. "I know what that word means. It was on the SAT."
He gave her a sidelong look and disappeared into the shadows of his office. The light clicked on, a few things rattled, and he reemerged with the battered boombox which they used for Buffy's exercises and a cassette tape with a scratched cover that read, "Best of Big Band." He set the boombox on the counter and plugged it in. "A simple box step," he said to her over his shoulder, making it into a query.
"Yes," Buffy said, definitively. Then frowned. "Why do they call it a box step?"
Giles was rolling down his sleeves and buttoning them. "Because the steps you take form a square," he said, pinning the cuff awkwardly to his left wrist and working the button in. That done, he walked past her to the table, liberated his jacket from the chair, and shrugged into it.
"Where are you going?" she said, in some confusion, as she watched him straighten his waistcoat.
"I'm not going anywhere. I merely thought," he said, not looking up, "that rumpled shirtsleeves didn't exactly convey an impression of gentility."
"Oh," was all she could think of to say.
He looked up at her, and she was suddenly acutely aware of her mussed hair, her black leggings, favored for slaying but rather frayed around the bottoms, and her sweat-stained tank. "I'm not exactly striking the right note myself," she said, with an embarrassed smile.
He said with a wry smile, "Well, it's only a lesson. Let me show you the steps."
He hadn't turned on the music yet. She went to stand next to him and watched with interest as he moved his feet deliberately forward, over, back, and finally back to where he had begun. "For you," he said, "it's the opposite to this; you go backwards first, then come round."
"Right," Buffy said.
"Try it."
So she looked down at her own sneakered feet and began to move them, backwards first.
"Is that the complementary foot to mine?" he prompted her.
"Oh!" She started over and began with the other foot.
"Good," he said, when she had completed the box twice. "Well, I think you've got the idea of the steps. Now let's try it in practice, shall we." He went to the boombox and put on the tape. His spine had gone all straight and British, Buffy noticed. She hoped that only meant that he had gone into teacher mode. She didn't think she could deal with him going all inhibited for inhibition's sake.
He turned to her just as the first song scratched to life on the ancient cassette: a slow jazz number Buffy recognized but didn't know the name of. He came toward her and held up his left hand, turning the palm over. "How's this work?" Buffy asked him, moving tentatively toward him.
"You put your right hand here—" he indicated his upturned palm— "and your other on my shoulder. It can work the other way round, if necessary," he said, as she moved into his prescribed embrace. He was quite a bit taller than she was, something she well knew from their sparring matches, so her hand wound up more above the crook of his arm than on his shoulder. It seemed to work okay, as did his hand, gentle and impersonal, supporting her waist. "Hey," she said, "I'm doing it!"
He laughed. "You're not dancing yet. We haven't even moved."
"Oh. Right."
"Right then," he said, and initiated the steps.
Which she immediately fumbled over. "Oops," she said.
"Keep moving," he instructed her.
"Okay," she said. "Oops! Sorry."
"That's all right. Start again, then."
They started again, but the second attempt was as abortive as the first. "Don't back up so fast," he said.
"I'm trying to look at your feet," she said.
"Don't do that."
"Then how am I going to know when to move?" she complained.
He gave her a look. "Do you watch a vampire's fists, or his eyes?"
"Oh," she said.
They tried again, and this time they were able to bring the music into it a little; Buffy found her feet and her spine responding to the brass as it carried both the melody and the swinging weight of the beat. Then she stumbled over his feet again, and gave a little laugh. They tried it again, and though she wasn't tripping over him so much anymore, they still weren't moving together, even when she tried to match her steps to his. "What am I doing wrong?" she said, frustrated, when one of her steps set them off balance and threatened to tear her out of his arms altogether.
There was an amused little smile on his face, which, at this angle, wasn't any less irritating than usual. "This isn't like slaying," he said.
"But—but you said—"
"Well," he amended, "the intuitive part is. But the movement isn't. You're not fighting; you're cooperating; you're communing with your partner. Also," he said, more prosaically, "you need to stop trying to lead."
"I don't even know what leading is," Buffy wailed.
"It's when you take the initiative and try to steer us around the floor," he said, irony in his voice. "I'm supposed to be doing that."
She wrinkled her nose and made a mouth at him. "A man must have invented dancing," she said.
"If so," he said serenely, "it was too many aeons ago to discover."
Buffy snorted.
"Besides," Giles said, "I'm fairly certain it hasn't escaped you that it's quite possible to lead by following." He looked down at her, his eyes shrewdly reading her face. He had taken his glasses off for this adventure, and Buffy could see the pink marks they had left on either side of his nose.
"Maybe," she conceded. She lowered her chin and was silent for several steps; her lip was still in a pout, but it was now mostly a pout of concentration. Giles's instruction, however, seemed to be paying off: they completed several boxes without mishap, and had even found a rhythmic equilibrium, though it was different from that which Buffy knew with Angel.
"You're taller than Angel," she observed, leaning her head back to look at him again.
Giles said with an absent bitterness: "Yes, well, he has me in weight and vampiric strength." He looked down at her, caught the stricken look on her face, and was immediately penitent. "I'm sorry," he said. "That was—that was unkind."
She shook her head and lowered her chin again, leaning closer so that she wouldn't have to look at him. What with one apocalypse and another, she often managed to forget what Angel had done to him. Now she wondered if Giles managed to forget ever. Her throat began to ache a little.
His hand tightened reassuringly on hers, and he held her a little closer. Buffy responded in kind. Her father should have done this, should have been here to give her these lessons. Instead she was learning from Giles, who had no children, who because of his calling could never settle on any single role with her. Who was taller than Angel, and moved differently, and had a heartbeat (she could feel the pulse very faintly in his hand), and a human male scent. Who had fought with her—fought against her, sometimes—trained her, accepted her, sponsored her. Betrayed her. Buffy shut her eyes briefly, wishing that last thought away. He had grieved with her, too, many times, comforting and receiving comfort. In the whole crazy hell of their lives together he had steadily offered her honesty and warmth.
Literally. Buffy realized slowly that their steps to the music had grown more organic, and their hold on each other had settled into a real embrace, an embrace in which for once she was not the only one contributing the blood warmth. She was dancing. This was what Giles had been talking about: partners, on the dance floor, cooperating. Communing.
She was dancing. With Giles. Who was human, and strong, and soft-voiced, and had his own scent, masculine and curiously not at all of books. She remembered Faith had said on meeting Giles, If I had known Watchers were this young and hot.... Faith was insane, or, at least morally bankrupt, which would explain—but no, there was her mother too, whose thought Buffy had overheard clearly as she hustled out of Buffy's bedroom like a bat out of hell a few weeks ago—God, he was like a stevedore—
Before she knew what she was doing, Buffy had broken the spell, wrenched herself back from him, and stood shaking and wide-eyed. He stopped too, and the music went on without them, cracklingly soft and graceful in the silence of the library.
"What's wrong?" he said.
Her first urge was to flee completely—just get out of the library and put her sanity back together, figure out what pieces were permanently missing once she was out of his presence—but before she could move to do so she recovered enough to realize what that could do to him. It would be unfair of her to barge in, demand he give her a dance lesson, then run out on him without explaining why. Of course he would think he had done something wrong, and he had only done what she asked. He had been so careful of her since—since the night he was fired—
"Nothing," Buffy said, trying a nervous laugh. "I just—I only thought—did you hear something?" She looked around, desperate for something to have made a noise; but there was only the music, winding on as brassy and quietly seductive as ever.
He looked around too, blankly, and back at her. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "No," he said, "I don't hear anything. Buffy, perhaps we'd—"
Quick as thought, Buffy had made her decision. "Then," she said, with another anxious smile, "it was just me hearing things again. Been so jumpy lately. Let's finish the song." She went to him and insinuated herself back into his arms; after a moment he acquiesced and began the dance again, though he did say, "Are you sure?"
"I'm fine," Buffy said, with her face close to his lapel, so he couldn't read her expression. He was distressingly talented at reading her, not that she'd been subtle or anything. Way to go, Buffy, she thought. Subtle's your middle name, isn't it?
"Well," he said, when they had made several determined boxes, "all right."
The song found its close just as they had begun to recoup their previous smooth rhythm. He let go of her and stepped back, then went to the boombox. The tape stopped with a loud click just as the next tune began, a fast one. "I think you've got the idea," he said mildly.
"Yeah," she said, cocking one shoulder and trying to look nonchalant.
"Not bad for a first lesson," he said. "But of course I knew you'd pick it up quickly." His praise was the same as always, appreciative without frill or flattery.
"I've got to go," Buffy said. "It's late. Mom'll—" She stopped. No avenue was safe. She had to bolt. "Bye." She hurried out of the library, out of his sight, as fast as she could without actually running.
Giles watched her go, pinching his lips ruefully. He had been afraid of that. Buffy wasn't naive, but she did have blind spots when it came to him. And if he wanted to be honest with himself, he had liked moving quietly behind those blind spots, free from teenage scrutiny and censure. He looked over at the boombox, hesitated, then turned the music back on, thinking it might be nice to translate to some cheerful swing music for a change.
So Buffy had finally cottoned on that he was a man. Giles went to the table, picked up his glasses, and fished out his handkerchief to clean them. Worse things had happened. Possibly this wouldn't result in disaster. Probably. Considering the weight of the world Buffy was carrying at the moment—and her efforts to shore up her relationship with Angel—she would probably forget it soon enough. He wished he hadn't said that about Angel. He didn't want her thinking that he wasn't going to support her, even if he did know what she did not, that all her efforts would almost certainly come to nothing. Even if he privately thought that was for the best. Angel had another destiny to chase, and Buffy….
Speaking of destinies, Giles had some serious translating to do. He put more of a concerted effort into cleaning his glasses.
The library door banged open, and Buffy rushed in. Giles almost dropped his glasses. "Buffy—what—?"
Instead of answering, she ran to him, grabbed him roughly, pulled him down, and kissed his cheek. "I forgot to say thank you," she said in a rush, and dashed out the door as quickly as she'd come in.
He blinked, watching the door swing shut for the second time in ten minutes. The music burbled brassily under the surface of his attention.
As endearments went, it was rather rough; she had handled him like a sack of potatoes, with a Slayer's touch rather than a girl's. He wasn't sure he wouldn't come off with a bruise or two, even where she'd kissed him. He put his glasses back on and sat back down to his text, a little smile hidden in the corner of his mouth.
"Such a strange girl," he murmured as he picked up his pencil.
Finis