Giles entered the library about an hour before the school day would begin, opened the book cage for Oz, who was beginning to stir, then walked back in the direction of the stacks, drinking a few more sips of the shockingly good teachers' lounge coffee. There, he was slightly surprised to find Buffy, a few books in her lap, her head resting on her shoulder. Giles bent down curiously to retrieve one of the books scattered on the floor around her chair. The Precognitive Power of the Subconscious. What was this about?
"Hey," Buffy muttered sleepily.
"Hello," Giles greeted, smiling affectionately at her. She shifted the books off of her lap, and he caught glimpses of their titles as well. "Exploring Demon Dimensions and The Mystery of Acathla?"
Buffy fidgeted uncomfortably. She had gotten nowhere with the books, but maybe Giles could help. At any rate, she would feel better if she could talk to someone about it. "It-it's just—I had a dream last night, after I went home from patrol. And zero luck finding a beastie, by the way."
Giles looked at her shrewdly. "This dream of yours didn't happen to be about Angel, did it?" Even if the vampire was a topic of discussion he could happily avoid for the rest of his life, he could tell that Buffy needed both a confidante and someone who could give her educated advice, and he was the one who fit that mold best at present.
"Am I that easy to read?" she asked resignedly. He smiled kindly at her, and she felt slightly better. "Yeah, it was. I mean, I've been dreaming about him a lot since—but this was different."
"How so?"
"It felt…it felt real. Like I was seeing what's happening to him. So, I tried to read up and find out what the, uh, dimension, I guess, that he's in is like, to see if that was what was in my dream, but…."
"Nothing helpful?" he asked.
"Not yet. From what I read before I fell asleep, nobody's ever exactly taken a documentary crew into Hell, so there's not much to go on."
Giles smirked into his Styrofoam cup, but sobered quickly. "I'm not sure that's what the dream was about."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you're dating again, attending school—for the most part, life is back to normal. Your subconscious might simply be rejecting the return to equilibrium by showing you this. It's the part of you that doesn't want to let you move on. Fixating on it won't help you, Buffy."
"But I can't move on until I know if this is real or just a subconscious guilt trip," she said, a tiny plea audible in her tone. "Seeing him like that, and being unable to do anything to help him? It hurts, and I can't stand it, Giles!" She blinked rapidly to keep the moisture welling in her eyes at bay.
"Then I'll do everything I can to help," he promised. Buffy looked at him, her expression overflowing with gratitude. He pulled her into a reassuring hug, and she sniffed loudly.
"Thank you," she said. "I know you probably don't want to do this, but it means so much to me." Giles almost let loose an incredulous laugh. Didn't she know that he would do anything to spare her some of this heartache?
At the sound of the library door opening, they broke apart. "Yes, well," said Giles gruffly. "For the moment, we should probably focus our energies on whatever is mauling students to death."
"Right," said Buffy, smiling a little.
[o]
In his third floor London apartment, Wesley was enjoying a solitary dinner of shepherd's pie, with what remained of the excellent rhubarb crumble his mother had brought him the previous day to follow for pudding. But even a delicious meal and an hour spent watching the new Red Dwarf episode and a Blackadder rerun could not take his mind off recent events.
With a frown, he put down his knife and fork and walked to the small second bedroom of the apartment, which he was using as an office. The room was so crammed with books that it was hard to get to his desk—the surface of which was completely hidden beneath everything he had found at the Council's library about Angelus. The small silver Claddagh ring sat on top of the mess of papers and peeling leather volumes.
He had not told Mr. Travers about this ring, nor did he plan to. After all, Travers's assumption that the Hellmouth's prolonged influence on Acathla was what had resulted in Angelus's return was quite a sensible explanation. However, it seemed to Wesley that the ring was a very crucial piece of the puzzle.
It was definitely too small to have belonged to Angelus, and Wesley doubted very much that an Irish ring would have come from the same demon dimension where the vampire had presumably been trapped. That could only mean that it had been put there by someone from this dimension. A female someone, most likely, judging by the size. How that might be connected with Angelus's return from Hell, Wesley had no idea, but it intrigued him nonetheless.
What he really wanted to do, even though the mere idea of it sent prickles of fear up and down his spine, was to talk to Angelus directly about it. But that would remain beyond the range of possibility as long as Angelus continued show no signs of sentient thought. What a fate for one of the most sadistically cunning vampires on record to suffer, Wesley thought as he returned to the kitchen to finish his shepherd's pie: to be broken down to the intelligence level of a beast. He almost felt sorry for him, and he suspected that whoever had left the ring in that mansion felt quite a bit more than that.
[o]
The rest of Buffy's day was not particularly enjoyable. All morning, her thoughts were evenly split between miserable speculation on what her dream about Angel could mean and mounting worry about how Willow hadn't had any better luck in finding evidence to prove that Oz wasn't responsible for Jeff's death than she had. By lunchtime, she was still so distracted that she barely said or ate anything, which made Scott and his friends, Pete and Debbie, think she had some kind of mood disorder. It was hard to care about what other people thought of her at the moment, though, so she left the cafeteria before she could feel obligated to pretend to be cheerful.
Matters were made several times worse when she went to see Mr. Platt for her second Snyder-ordered counseling session with him, only to find him dead in his chair, his face grotesquely clawed beyond recognition. The only good thing about this horrific new development was that it took Oz off of the suspect list. Since he had been the only one on it, however, it also put them back in square one.
They did not remain there for long. It seemed that Scott's normal friends were less normal than Buffy had thought. This discovery (which came in the form of Debbie failing to conceal a fresh black eye from Oz when he met her before sundown to lend her his biology notes) was the first in a series of events that culminated in Giles lying spread-eagled on the floor beside to the library counter with a misfired tranquilizer dart sticking out of his back, wolf-Oz running loose through the halls of the school while Faith and Willow chased after him with the tranq gun, and Buffy following the trail of blood Pete was leaving in his wake from the nasty wound Oz had given him moments before.
Eventually, after a clever detour that might have succeeded in throwing her off, had it not been for the smears of blood around a window above the lockers, the trail led Buffy to a large utility room at the back of the school.
But not soon enough.
"Oh, God," said Buffy, looking down at Debbie's lifeless form. She barely had time to feel her wrist before she was seized from behind and thrown across the room, where she hit a coil of tubing and fell to the floor.
Before she could recover, Pete, his face still a spiderweb of bulging veins, was upon her again. He pulled her up and began to backhand her repeatedly across the face. "You're all the same, you're all the same!" he snarled in between blows.
Finally, Buffy managed to wriggle out of his grip enough to aim a good kick at his stomach. He went staggering back into a stack of wooden crates, and she quickly flipped herself back to her feet and shifted into her fighter's stance. But Pete wasn't interested in a fair fight. Instead of renewing his attack on her, he leered evilly and grabbed the end of the heavy set of shelves beside her and pulled, just like he had done in the library. This time, Buffy leapt out of the way before it could fall on her, and it landed on the floor with a deafening crash.
"That trick won't work on me twice," she said. Pete snarled angrily and jumped over the fallen shelves towards her, and then they were locked in close combat. Buffy landed two powerful punches to his face, but didn't dodge in time to avoid his claws, which raked through the flesh of her upper arm. She gasped in pain, but didn't give Pete a chance to continue his attack, driving her knee hard into his stomach instead. All of the air whooshed out of his lungs, and he doubled over.
Buffy put more distance between them again, retreating until her back met the wall, and she briefly tried to assess the damage he'd done to her arm. The wound was agonizingly painful and bleeding as profusely as Pete was where Oz had bitten him. She looked up again just in time to see him coming at her fast, his face a mask of insane rage, his fist drawn back. She ducked, and his hand collided with the fuse box behind her, his heightened strength punching right through the thin metal cover and crushing the switches within, unleashing an electric current strong enough to power the school and sending it jolting through his body. The solitary bulb lighting the utility room flickered as Pete shook uncontrollably from the voltage, then went out with a little pop when he collapsed.
Buffy gagged at the smell of singed hair and flesh, then stumbled her way out of the room containing the bodies of Debbie and Pete, pressing her right hand to the bloody mess that was the area below her left shoulder.
Back in the library, a very jumpy Willow helped to bandage her up while Giles slowly came round and Faith dragged Oz back into the now doorless book cage and barricaded it with some shelves and a filing cabinet. When Giles saw Buffy's injured arm, he immediately told her to go home to get a full night of sleep, and she was only too happy to oblige.
Check it out! The third update in under a week! I promise I won't get so carried away with this story that I forget to work on "Season 9". Anyway, yay for heartwarming father/daughter hugs between Buffy and Giles...as well as for conveniently placed fuse boxes. Heh. Also, don't worry; there will be more Angel in the next chapter.