Chapter Text
Buffy hadn’t seen her Watcher in a while.
“That’s weird, right?” She asked Willow as the two were sitting outside on a picnic blanket, eating their lunches. A gentle breeze floated through the air. “Tell me that’s weird. This is the opposite of the ‘Slayer Efficiency Improvement Schedule’ he was going on about earlier this week!”
Willow, finishing munching her sandwich, shook her head. “Nah, I don’t think it’s that weird.”
“I haven’t even seen him in the hallways, or in the lounge, or the teacher break room.” She took a bite of a piece of cold pizza. “Wil, he won’t come out of the library stacks.”
“At all?”
“At all. ”
The redhead paused. “...Okay, that is weird. And that’s coming from me. You know I love the scent of library books in the morning.”
“I know, right?! It is very not- Giles-ey of him to not come out of his hidey hole or whatever it is and say 'hi' to his Slayer. Like, hello! I’m the Chosen One! He could at least choose to say hi!”
After a pause, Willow had a flash of realization in her eyes. “...Sounds like someone misses their Watcher.”
Buffy’s face flushed bright red. “N-No! God, no. If anything, it’s nice to be able to go shopping for once after school, instead of doing yet another round of, punch-the-dummy-and-pretend-it’s-Angel-so-I-hit-it-harder. I don’t mind that. It’s just… It’s weird! He goes from being on my case all the time to silence. And when he did speak, it sounded like he had the worst cold ever.”
A sympathetic nod. “I wonder if he used his sick days after the funeral. You know. Ms. Calendar’s.” Willow sped past the mention of their late teacher, clearly hesitant to think more than she had to about Jenny’s passing. (Substitute teaching was already hard enough for her, grief notwithstanding.) “And that’s why he isn’t at home resting.”
“No way. He, like, lives and breathes work. There’s no way he’d go back home unless we made him go back home. I was ready to offer him Thera-Flu and a doctor’s note on the spot.”
“What’d he say, anyway, that’s got you so worried?”
The two had begun walking at that point, with Buffy carrying the picnic blanket, her lunch bag looped around one of arms. “It wasn’t what he said that worried me. It was that he didn’t even come out to greet me when he did!” Buffy tried to put on her best attempt at his English accent: “He was all, ‘C-come back tomorrow, Buffy. I’m busy.’ But, like, in the distance. The weirdest thing was, it sounded like Giles, yeah, but if he smoked 10 packs a day for a decade. His voice sounded shot.”
“Gnarly cold, huh.”
“Yeah. And, and, here’s the thing! He said the same thing yesterday, too!” Buffy gesticulated, almost dropping the blanket in the process, but caught it in a swift motion without missing a beat. “It’s not like the vamps have been less-than-chatty and less-than-bitey these last couple of days! If anything, I think the shitshow at the Bronze a few weeks ago riled them up. Patrolling last week was rough. ”
Ironically enough, that had also been related to Giles. Not that Buffy could blame him for going absolutely berserk after finding Ms. Calendar’s body, but…
She shuddered. By this point, the two teens had returned to the hallways of Sunnydale High, approaching Buffy’s locker.
“But, this week has been better, right?”
Flatly: “Define ‘better.’”
“Well, I mean…” They approached Buffy’s locker, and Willow moved to stand behind her friend as Buffy stowed the blanket. “Haven’t you run into mostly non-vampire demons this week? That’s probably a good thing, after… Well, y’know…”
The cold, cruel eyes of the monster that had once been her boyfriend–who was still at large, to boot–flashed in Buffy’s mind. “...You have a point,” the blonde conceded, attempting (and just barely succeeding) to put her lunch bag on top. “Still…”
“It’s giving you the wiggins, isn’t it.”
Buffy nodded, shutting her locker in perfect sync with her words. “ Major wiggins.”
“Well, Buffy, I mean, look at it this way—maybe he’s trying to protect you. You said he has a cold, right? Maybe he doesn’t want you to get sick.”
“True.” She shrugged. “Still, I don’t think fighting a demon attacking a blood bank does a cold give. That guy was a med student, but it’s not like he threw the common cold, but on steroids right at us.” The villain had chanted something vaguely ancient-sounding and threatening, though, so maybe that was part of it? But, then, wouldn’t she have been impacted as well?
Buffy didn’t have time to think too hard on this. “...Regardless, I’m gonna check in with him after classes end today. I mean, my Mom wanted me to ask Giles for a ride home, anyway, since she’ll be staying late at the Gallery tonight.” Her mom had mentioned something about how big the next show was for business. Buffy didn’t mind, frankly; late nights for Joyce meant less suspicion when she got home late at night after a patrol, especially if her mother had been out and about.
“Maybe guilt at stranding you at Sunnydale High for a whole night will be enough to push him out of the shadows,” Willow joked, cracking a small smile.
Buffy could hope.
English, World History, and French came and went, and once the bell rang, Buffy bolted to the library.
Upon opening the door, while there hadn’t been much that had changed since she had visited the night before, there was a book open on the large table near the staircase. Next to it, another book in what appeared to be Greek. Beside that, a book in Latin. There was also, Buffy noticed, a mangled printout of a lithograph etching. Upon closer inspection, she realized that it was the demon from the blood bank encounter earlier that week. Strange.
Even stranger still, there was still no Giles to be found. Maybe he had left the stacks, after all. Somehow. (Not likely.)
She sat down at the table, reading aloud what was in the text to herself: “‘A Voracity Curse.’” More like bore-acity. “‘If activated, the afflicted will experience extreme hunger, satiated only by the consumption of live flesh.’” A grimace. “‘When consuming live flesh, they will assume an aspect of the creature that has been eaten. The only way to reverse the Curse is to consume human flesh or blood; specifically, of one imbued with immense magic power.’”
That sounded like the opposite of a good time. Still, why was Giles looking this up? Had he run out of reading material, or…? Maybe he was…?
…No. Buffy stopped that train of thought. If Giles had been afflicted with a curse as dangerous as this one sounded, she would have found him holed up in his apartment, trying his best to remove the carnage. Like when Ethan and Eyghon had shown up and he’d locked himself away, drinking and catastrophizing. He wasn’t at his apartment, nor was he answering his landline. So… It probably was, in fact, a nasty cold.
She was about to ask for him, to call out and see how he was doing, but a wave of exhaustion overtook her at that moment. Maybe it was from stress, maybe it was from having her ass handed to her by the French language last period… she couldn't know for sure. But what she did know was that Giles wasn't making his presence known, if he were there, and she, for one, welcomed a nap.
Buffy moved the book about velocity curses or whatever the hell it was that Giles had been reading about off to the side, took off her jacket, wadding it into a makeshift pillow, and rested her head upon the table, dozing off.
The Summers girl had had a pleasant dream, considering. Something about hanging out at the mall with Willow and Xander, drinking Orange Juliuses and window shopping. Nothing too out of the ordinary, outside of when she felt something touch her shoulder, flinching hard enough in the dream that she awoke in real life.
Her eyes shot open. There was a gentle pressure on her shoulders, yes; something soft and airy. Groggily, she touched one shoulder, finding a light blanket beneath her fingertip. Must have been Giles’ doing.
Speak of the devil: there he was, back to her. Her Watcher was, in fact, alive. And… he was… in a tattered… Blazer… and torn… pants…?
That wasn’t very Giles-y of him. Wait. That wasn’t Giles, was it.
Buffy froze. Her muscles tensed. Evening out her breathing so as to not give away that she’d awoken, she waited, watching. He was turned away from her. While she couldn’t see what this Imposter Watcher (Imp-Watcher? There had to be a snappier nickname for a title like that.) frantically leafing through the large tome Buffy had read from earlier before. It was then that she noticed: this man in Giles’ suit was not only larger than Giles was, but appeared to have a snake-like tail. Something that looked like a malformed wing, sprouting from his right shoulder blade, peeked out from beneath a hole in a tattered tweed jacket. Giles’s battered tweed jacket. Which was not normally battered. If anything, he treated his work clothes like his hypothetical firstborn child. Even looking at them funny merited a scolding. He wouldn’t let himself get roughed up without a fight. (Ethan had called him “Ripper” for a reason.)
And yet… she felt oddly safe, given the circumstances. Her gut was telling her that she wasn’t in danger, but also, the evidence to the contrary was right in front of her.
This was not Giles. Her blood ran cold.
As quietly as she could, as the Slayer got up, she grabbed her stake from her purse under the table—travel-sized for slaying on the go. In a swift, fluid motion, she moved behind the stranger, pinning him from behind. One arm went around his neck, restricting his air intake. Her stake was positioned at his back. The wing poked at her shoulder. It was sharp.
The stranger flinched, frozen in place. She could hear his breath hitch in his throat.
The girl's words were laced with venom. “I don't know who you are or what you've done with Giles, but if you’ve hurt my Watcher… You’ll find out what it’s like to be a shish-kebab." (…That sounded cooler in her head.)
As if to make up for how lame that had sounded said aloud, she pushed the stake the tiniest bit more into the beast’s back, punctuating her threat. A pained noise followed. "Now, talk. What did you do with Giles?”
The stranger’s voice was measured, but underscored with a subtle hint of panic. “You know, I would be far more flattered that my Slayer was concerned for my sake if she weren’t trying to kill me.”
Buffy knew that voice anywhere, despite its slightly deeper, grow-like tone. There was only one person it could have been:
“....Giles?”