Chapter 27

Buffy looked up from her text conversation with Spike when Willow threw herself on the foot of her bed with a groan. "Long day, witchy woman?"

"I think today was the longest day I've had since Sunnydale." Willow responded without looking up. "It's okay if I sleep here, right?"

Buffy shrugged, glancing back at her phone. "I mean, I think you'd be more comfortable with a pillow, but who am I to say? Maybe you want your neck at that angle."

Willow raised the fingers of one hand. "Okay, throw me a pillow."

"You don't wanna brush your teeth first?" Buffy frowned and looked back at her friend.

"Can it wait six hours? I'll be ready to get up by then, probably." Willow groaned again, and with tremendous effort rolled onto her back. "Do you think I could brush my teeth like this? Because now that you say it, I can still taste those garlic chips I ate earlier, and it feels kind of gross not to brush."

"Probably not." Buffy slid out from under the sheets and crawled over to Willow. "Seriously, what's going on? It's not like you to be so exhausted by a day at the office. You love problem solving."

"I really do, but that's not what I did today. Mostly today I did a bunch of nuisance spells, and translated 'Watcher' to 'Techie' and back a bunch. And then I had to deal with Lavinia."

"I thought you liked Lavinia and Sophie."

"Oh, I do. I liked them a lot when they were practicing their magic and partying in town, and offering to let me hang out for both. Now that I'm trying to get things done so I can go home, and Lavinia has decided she wants to be involved in the Council, she's incredibly frustrating. I understand the inherent problems in being in your 90s and being physically 25, but I don't see how her annoyance with people underestimating her is my problem, or what I'm supposed to do about it. Also, just because her little sister ran the Council forty years ago doesn't mean she knows what the heck is going on now."

Buffy patted her friend's shoulder sympathetically. "Can't we send her to the Academy in London? I mean, if Lavinia really wants to help out, shouldn't she go through training like all the other Watchers?"

Willow shook her head, blinking her eyes open. "She'd probably be willing to go if Giles were feeling better, and if she'd sold all her puppies. Until that happens, we just have to deal with her. And by we, I mean me, since she doesn't seem to be bothering you at all."

"No, she hasn't asked me for anything. She's been polite if she's there when I go see Giles, but she doesn't seem to care about me one way or the other." Buffy frowned. "Does that seem weird to you?"

"Not really. Sophie and Vin are kind of impulsive, I sort of think this 'get involved with the Council' thing is a whim that's gonna peter out once Giles is back to normal. Lavinia could be focused on the way the Council used to run and think you're not important, she could be annoyed with you for keeping Giles in California for so long, or she could just be oblivious to everyone who isn't a magic user." Willow's eyes closed again. "How's Spike doing?"

Buffy grabbed for her phone, pushing Giles' weird aunts from her mind. "He's doing okay. He had physical therapy today, and it sounds like it kicked his ass and made him feel better at the same time. He's excited to come up here tomorrow."

"Of course he is. You were supposed to be in Bath for the day, possibly overnight. Here it is three days later and he's only getting you back to London to go to a funeral."

"It's not like I meant for this to happen. We've just been so busy…" Buffy sighed and checked her messages again. "And now Andrew wants to talk to me. Sorry."

Willow zoned out while Buffy and Andrew had a quiet conversation about stuff going on at the research library in London and someone in IT he thought was acting suspicious. When the knock came on the door Willow thought she'd imagined it at first. She opened her eyes again and watched Buffy pace and talk to Andrew. It was clear she hadn't heard it, maybe Willow was imagining…Nope, there it was again, definitely a knock.

Willow waved to get Buffy's attention, but Buffy had gone over to the chaise lounge by the window that was covered in her papers from three days of meetings and interrogations. Willow groaned and hauled herself upright, cursing Buffy internally.

Lavinia was on the other side of the door, her eyes going wide when she realized it was Willow on the other side. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I end up at the wrong room? I thought for sure we put Buffy in the Rose Room."

"No, this is Buffy's room, I'm just here…" Willow leaned against the doorframe and waved vaguely, allowing the other woman to walk past her. She'd come to give Buffy a report on the new wards she'd set up for the IT department and who at the Coven would be training Council personnel to maintain them, but the bed had just been too tempting. "I should get back to my room, I'm dead on my feet. Not in a vampire way, but I'm just so knocked out…"

"Hey, Wills, sorry about that. I think we need to prioritize coming up with a new system for written reports; that call could have been an e-mail, and there's no way I'm going to remember everything to report to Giles once he's back on his feet." Buffy was taking notes in the margins of a report she'd been given earlier in the day, still facing away from the door. "You didn't fall asleep on me, did you?"

"No, but I'm on my feet now, so I'm gonna go sleep in my own room. Also, Vin's here to see you. Good night." Willow stumbled into the hallway, allowing the door to close behind her.

Buffy spun to face her Watcher's aunt, pen slipping from her suddenly numb fingers. She couldn't imagine what the witch needed to talk with her about at midnight after ignoring her for days, and half her brain was still on Andrew's phone call. "Umm, hello." Buffy blinked at the other woman, not really sure what to say.

"Hello, Buffy. Do you mind if we have a chat?" Lavinia smiled gently, taking in the tension in the younger woman's body and hoping to reassure her. "You seem rather busy for so late in the evening, with Willow in here and people calling you…"

"Yeah." Buffy sighed and looked at her notes, then retrieved the pen she'd dropped. "I'm trying to do my regular job, and split Giles' job with Chet Freeman, and I've got some family stuff going on." She jotted down a few more words, hoping she'd remember what she needed to in the morning, then tossed the pen aside. "How is Giles, by the way? He seemed okay when I stopped by after dinner."

"Rupert's doing well, I think. Sophie keeps brewing up potions to extract the residual spell effects from his body, but then his memory will get muddied, and we have to help him sort things out before we do anything else." Lavinia sighed and took the armchair Buffy cleared off for her, watching as the younger woman sat on the bed facing her.

"So, what can I do for you? I'm not bothering Giles too much when I come to visit, am I? I don't want to upset him, but I need to make sure he's getting better, you know?"

Lavinia smiled. "It's quite alright. I wanted to see you because…Well, to start, they reconnected Rupert's e-mail today."

Buffy shook her head with a grimace. "He's probably getting 500 messages a day or something, right? Just turn off the computer, or mute it or something. We'll start going over what he's missed with him once you guys give the okay."

"Oh, trust me, the first thing I did was mute all the noises on that fool machine. It had too many dings and clicks entirely." She shivered delicately. "But, I have to admit, I was curious. Rupert sometimes spoke so highly of you, at other times with indifference or outright scorn. And I know some of what Edna dealt with, when she was in charge. How the old Council operated. So, I took a look through Rupert's e-mails, starting with when he was reinstated to his role as Watcher and they set up the account for him. I believe he must have fallen under someone's influence very quickly from that point."

"Yeah, we were afraid of that. When we started breaking the spells on him, the battle with Glory seemed like the clearest thing on his mind." Buffy sighed and rubbed her eyes, grimacing at the skin oil she could feel on her hands. "So, I hate to sound like a bitch, but what do you want from me? What is it you think I should do, shouldn't do, can help you with, or whatever? Do you need to yell at me for endangering your nephew? Why are you here?"

"Actually, I'm here to thank you." Lavinia said quietly, feeling sympathy for Buffy's obviously overwhelmed emotions. "I saw how many times you reached out to Rupert while he was away, how you worried when he didn't respond. I wish my sister and I had done as good a job keeping after him. You knew there was something off about him instinctively, where we had to be told. I'm embarrassed that we didn't realize something was wrong when he came back to England after your death. He was sad, certainly, but it also seemed he'd found a new mission with the Council leadership. We thought he was coping with work. Which wouldn't really be like Rupert, but…I don't know. I have no good excuse for not knowing something was wrong."

"He was…Close to normal, when he came back to Sunnydale. But there was something missing in his eyes." Buffy looked in Lavinia's direction, but her gaze was distant. "We used to be so close. He wasn't a touchy-feely person, but there were hugs and pats and shoulder squeezes. Smiles that were just for me. For a while I was closer to Giles than either of my parents." She sighed. "After I died, it always felt like he was holding himself aloof. I though for the longest time that he was disappointed in me."

"I don't think you could have disappointed him." Lavinia tried to reassure her. "Granted we weren't in close contact with Rupert at all times, but any time Soph or I spoke to him after he was assigned to work with you, it was clear he cared." She stood and walked over to the bed, taking Buffy's hand in both of hers. "Some of the notes you sent to him, when he was here consulting with the Council, and while he was traveling to secure the potential Slayers…I was impressed that you seemed to know him so well. It was evident you cared about him."

Buffy gently squeezed the witch's fingers. "Thanks, I'm glad that came across. I'm so bad with words, normally…"

Lavinia shook her head. "I very much doubt that. You seem very well spoken."

"Thanks." Buffy rolled her eyes. "I've been working on it. I wish Giles had understood what I was saying in those e-mails the way you did."

"Oh, dear. No, Buffy, you don't understand. He never saw most of your messages when you sent them."

Buffy felt her jaw literally drop. "What?" Was that possible? Giles had occasionally answered a message, but he'd always complained so much about even being asked to use a computer, on some level she'd assumed he thought it wasn't worth his time to respond to her.

Lavinia nodded. "Whatever ward or work-around those conspirators had on Rupert's e-mails, many messages were diverted into the inboxes of other people. When Willow and your IT people got the spells broken, all the messages got stuck in a cache because Rupert's inbox was still not receiving them. They pushed through everything sitting unsent in the cache today, that's why Rupert's computer went insane."

"You may understand the whole IT thing better than I do." Buffy looked at Lavinia critically.

"I don't have any problem with technology. It's a tool, like any other." Lavinia shrugged. Part of being young was embracing new things, she'd never had any trouble doing that.

"I hope you don't mind me asking…Because this seems rude, but I'm gonna ask anyway. Do you think of yourself as 97, or 25?"

Lavinia blushed. "Err, well, both really. I have the memories of all the years I've lived. In terms of physical maturity I'm still young. It's gotten somewhat tiring over time, though, always being 25. What I've been feeling for the last few years is…I suppose curiosity is the closest thing. What would it be like to grow older, have children, have a job? It began as idle thoughts, but then one day I was reading an article about dog breeding and I thought, 'That's the thing to try. It's a job, and I love dogs, and it has some responsibility but not an overwhelming amount.' So I tried it, and one thing led to another… And now I'm wondering about all sorts of things I could try. It's almost like discovering magic again, like the world is opening up to me."

"What about the Council? Why the sudden interest?" Buffy didn't want to be mean or offensive, but she wasn't going to pull any punches just because this was Giles' aunt. She needed people she could rely on.

"There's always been an interest, we were born into the Council, don't forget. Until Edna died, there had always been a Fairweather on the Council. But, Watcher training just seemed so tedious and formal, didn't it? Too much about duty, and not enough fun. Rules about how to use magic." She shook her head. "I don't know that I can stick out the Watcher training course even now, but Willow mentioned that you were incorporating magic users into teams to train and support Slayers, and I thought that sounded like the sort of thing I can do."

Buffy ran her eyes over the other woman. "Especially if we keep your team in England, where you can check in on your dogs and your boyfriend, right?"

"And Rupert. Evidently he's not as good at looking after himself as we'd thought."

"Fair enough." Buffy nodded, pleased that Lavinia wasn't trying to take over. "But, you're going to have to take orders from Willow, and Roger or whatever his name is…The head of Magical Research. And you'll have to get certified and checked over by Althenea at the coven in Devon. Are you okay with that?"

Lavinia winced, but nodded. "Still not really keen on anyone telling me what to do with magic, but I suppose it's necessary."

"It really is." Buffy declared. "We learned our lesson with Willow and Giles, about having good communication about what kinds of magic are acceptable, and giving solid ethics training to people working with magic. If you don't want to play by our rules, you don't get to train newbies. I'm sure there are other things you could do in that case; research projects, or just housing for Slayer support teams or something. But, that's the deal; you have to agree to support the Council's mission, and follow the Coven's ethics rules to train Slayers and their support witches in magic."

"Not Council ethics rules?" Lavinia arched her eyebrow, somewhat surprised Buffy didn't seem interested in making her swear a fealty oath or the like.

Buffy snorted. "Right now we don't even know for sure if we've found all the Watchers who wanted us out. With the organization so messed up, I'm not sure we have real ethics rules. If they had them at some point, they clearly weren't following them. I trust the witches more right now."

Lavinia snorted. "I suppose that's fair. I've never had any serious objections to the Devon Coven, other than that they seemed so stuffy." She shrugged. "Then again, I am starting to be turned off by the total lack of rules. I can understand how, if this is essentially a different organization, you need to be somewhat strict as you get set up. You'll have to create a culture from whole cloth, you won't be able to rely on old Council traditions anymore."

"I don't even know the Council traditions." Buffy sighed, rolling her shoulders. "Giles was the person I would have looked to, to teach me those things. I'm still hoping he can do that, but not right now."

"No, not right now." Lavinia nodded. "Well, I don't want to keep you, I've said my piece…"

"Actually, Lavinia, do you mind if I ask you for some help." Buffy sighed. "I'd normally ask Giles, but in some ways I think you'd actually be a better person to talk to about this. You don't have any preconceptions, and you know a lot about magic."

Lavinia blinked. "Oh, well, of course I can try. What do you need?"

Buffy took a deep breath. "I don't know how much detail you need, so just let me know if I'm not giving you enough. My sister, Dawn, has a protection spell around her. It was done by an order of monks, and we don't know very much about it, except that it alters reality so it's very hard to detect. She has a boyfriend who does magic, and they came up with a ceremony to de-age her since…Well, unless you need to know, let it go. Let's just say she felt like she didn't get a childhood, and she wanted to get to be a kid, so the de-aging plan. Except that their spell had some weird consequences we don't understand. Like, on her friends, her school records, and all of that stuff the spell worked. On the boyfriend it didn't work at all, he says she looks the same to him while she says she looks noticeably younger, and he doesn't have any changes to his memory. Dawn, me, and my boyfriend; we all have both sets of memories. I remember all the way back to the day she was born, but in one memory I was three and a half, and in the other I was five and a half."

"That's an awful lot of effort, to use magic to make someone younger, only to stop after two years." Lavinia muttered, thinking about all the many aspects of magic that might be involved.

"Dawn said she made him stop the ceremony earlier than they'd intended. First of all, because his power is drawn from sexual energy. They did the thing right after…Anyway, as she got younger she felt weird about being naked with him and wanted to stop. Also, when she realized she wasn't losing her memories of being older, she worried she might go crazy if she were, like, four with the brain of an 18-year-old."

Lavinia nodded. "That's not an invalid concern. Do you mind if I borrow some note paper? I will need more details. What's your greatest concern in this? Why reality altered differently for the four of you? How the original spell was done? Do you want your sister to be able to go ahead and de-age herself as she intended if I can find a way to do that?"

Buffy relaxed somewhat as she went to find Lavinia a notepad. She had a good feeling about this, like she'd found a safe person to offload one of her burdens onto.