Fanfic: Getting Lucky.
Title: Getting Lucky.
Genre: ‘Buffy: the Vampire Slayer’, Jenny/Giles, humour/romance. Jenny Calendar ficathon entry for nova25.
Spoilers: Season two, through ‘Ted’. The story is set between ‘Ted’ and ‘Bad Eggs’. See me get unnervingly specific with my surreal insertions!
Rating: PG, for the most part.
Description: Never visit the carnival on a Hellmouth. Reads a bit like the first part of a longer story, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ve already been tricked that way once.
***
“This is nowhere near as funny as you seem to think it is,” Giles said sternly, leaning against the library counter and trying to ignore the interminable itching in his nether regions. Scabs itch; that was, he thought ruefully, a simple fact of medical science. The fact that his latest such scab was in a region that civility dictated not be scratched in public did nothing to lessen the itch.
“Actually, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Buffy, with great and -- Giles thought -- slightly sadistic good cheer. “Teacher gets shot in the butt with a crossbow? Comedy gold. They should recreate it every semester as a reward for students with good grades.”
“Fascinating. Something that might actually induce you to study.”
Buffy either missed his withering tone or simply ignored it, barreling full-speed ahead down the yellow brick path of her fantasy. “I’d make the honour roll every semester if I got to pick the teacher. Oh! And if you qualified three times, you’d get to shoot Snyder!”
“Buffy--”
“We could sell souvenir photos to pay for repairing vampire damage. And I bet we’d have the best archery club in the state--”
“Buffy.”
The petite Slayer stopped babbling, blinking innocently at him. “What?”
Giles held out an axe. “Patrol.”
“But...”
“Patrol.”
“Don’t you need me to provide moral support for your recovery?” she asked, hopefully.
“Believe me, at this point, I will recover more quickly if you are elsewhere.” Perhaps China, he added, silently. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and encounter a new breed of demon to be slain.”
Buffy sighed, doing her best to sound put-upon, and snatched the axe out of his hand, muttering, “Spoil-sport,” as she headed for the door.
“Yes, that’s right,” he called after her. “I ruin everything.”
The library door swung shut on Buffy’s exit, and he was finally, blessedly alone.
Glancing furtively around, Giles allowed himself the satisfaction of a long and shameful scratch.
*
Jenny Calendar was privately of the opinion that the single most challenging elective to teach at a high school level was Computers. Your classes were evenly divided between people who’d been shunted over because they couldn’t handle basic algebra and budding hackers who truly felt that they’d earned an ‘A’ just because they could hack the school computers and cause them to print ‘Principle Snyder Blows Goats I HAVE PROOF’ on all the attendance sheets.
Actually, she was willing to be convinced on that one.
Between the sullen jocks and the James Bond villains of tomorrow, she was completely exhausted. And that didn’t even take into account the amount of grading she had to do before the morning. Jenny directed her best baleful glare on the pile of papers currently cluttering her desk. “Disappear,” she suggested. Maybe she’d get lucky.
The papers did no such thing. In fact, their essential solidity suggested, she’d be better off trying to make the sky turn green. They had no intention of disappearing before they’d had the chance to ruin her night.
She was still glaring at the papers when there was a cautious knock on the classroom doorframe, and she looked up to see the familiar, slightly stooped form of Rupert Giles walking towards the desk. He was, she noted with guilty amusement, still limping slightly.
Memo to me: if you bury a crossbow bolt in a guy’s behind, he’ll limp for at least three days, she thought, and had to bite back a peal of giggles before they burst loose and betrayed the incongruity of her thoughts to him. “Hello, Rupert,” she said.
“Hello, Jenny,” he said, with one of those shy, utterly endearing smiles that he only used when there were no students around -- and when he was genuinely happy to see her. He was smiling like that more and more these days.
Maybe they were starting to make progress.
“What’s up? Do we have demons in the basement? Any chance they’ll chew the wiring and get the school closed due to lack of power?”
“Now you sound like one of my students.”
“Heaven forbid,” she replied, dryly. “Seriously. What strange, eldritch force has driven you down into the deep, scary bowels of the computer lab? Did the naughty forces of darkness install AOL on your Encyclopedia Britannica?”
She’s even lovely when she makes no sense whatsoever, Giles thought. This was fortunate, given that she seemed to give up on making sense at least two-thirds of the time. “I believe I was looking for the instructor.”
“Really?” Jenny looked exaggeratedly from one side to the other, then flashed him a vivid smile. “I think you’ve found her.”
“Oh, good.” Eyeing the pile of papers-to-be-graded somewhat warily, he asked, “Are you busy tonight?”
Jenny knew full well that a good, respectable, responsible teacher would reply ‘Yes, I am, sorry’ and spend her evening alone with the cat, a container of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream, and the pile of exams. She knew that. Really.
“Not at all,” she replied, and smiled.
*
“Carnival,” said Jenny, around a mouthful of sticky blue cotton candy. “Good choice.”
“It seemed...” Giles paused, fumbling for a word. ‘Romantic’ wouldn’t do, even though one of the most romantic moments of his adolescence -- if you could call spotty skin, intentionally torn trousers and sticking his hand inside the jumper of a girl most of the other boys in his form called ‘Horseface’ particularly romantic -- had occurred on a blessedly broken Ferris wheel. ‘Charming’ applied to many things, but not to this dirty, somewhat down-at-heel midway, with its tired barkers and over-cooked mystery meat hot dogs. Really, ‘unsanitary’ and ‘provincial’ were the first things that came to mind. He settled for a lame, “...like your sort of thing.”
Jenny smiled approvingly. “Good answer, English. You’re learning. Ooh, look, they have a House of Mirrors! Let’s go!” And she was bounding towards the cheaply-built attraction, obviously expecting him to follow.
Ah, the things men do for love. Giles seized that opportunity to abandon his own cotton candy in a convenient (if slightly tarnished) trash barrel, and followed her.
Admission to the mirror maze was a dollar, each. Giles paid for both tickets, and was only marginally surprised when his change came in the form of Walking Liberty silver dollars, the tall form of the American ideal dominating the back of all three coins.
“You don’t see these often,” he commented to Jenny, showing her the coins as they stepped inside.
“If you see them at all,” she said, frowning. “Most places don’t use them as change. And look at the dates -- none of these are less than twenty years old.”
“Perhaps we’ve fallen through a hole in time,” Giles joked, aware almost immediately of how dangerously probable that actually was, given that they were attending a carnival located right above a Hellmouth. “Er. I’d like to retract that statement.”
“If I have to live through the seventies again, I’m kicking your ass,” Jenny said, amused. “You don’t want to see me with a poodle perm.”
Giles pondered this mental image. “No, you’re quite right. I don’t.”
Laughing, Jenny Calendar took his hand and led him into the mirror maze.
*
They stumbled back outside three hours later, both of them rumpled, filthy and furious-looking. The midway was long since abandoned, and the ticket-taker’s booth in front of the House of Mirrors was closed.
Jenny kicked off her low-heeled shoes, snapping at Giles, “I cannot for the life of me understand why you choose to wear these infernal things for any length of time. My knees may never recover.”
“Actually, those are my knees,” Giles -- Jenny -- replied, while marveling at the fact that English accents were apparently like minds: they went where the personality went. Hearing Giles’ accent coming out of her own body was jarring, and not particularly pleasant. “And I wear them because you like them.”
“After this, I’ll be happy if I never see another woman wearing shoes more elevated than slippers,” Jenny -- Giles -- mumbled, bending to massage her calves.
“Hey, at least my body can walk properly.”
“Given that you’re the one who shot me with the crossbow, I believe we can dismiss that argument as spurious,” Giles replied.
Jenny sighed. “Let’s not get mad, all right? You’re in my body, and I’m in yours. We’re going to have to deal with it. At least until we can find someone to grab and shake briskly.”
“We’re going to have to spend the night like this, aren’t we?” Giles asked bleakly.
“Yes. And unless you want to start a lot of fun rumours at school, we’re going to have to teach like this, too.” Giles stared at him in horror, and Jenny sighed. “I’m not happy about it either. I just don’t think we have a choice.”
“I won’t do it!”
“Then you’ll be listening to people talk about our elopement for the rest of the school year.”
Giles groaned, burying her face in her hands. Awkwardly, Jenny patted his own body on the back. “There, there,” he said. “Breathe.”
“I can’t teach computers!”
“Sure you can. I’ll help you with lesson plans. Or you can let Willow run the class for you. She’d kill for the chance.”
Giles lifted her head, eyes wide. “Willow must never know!”
“Giles...”
“Seriously. They would...” Giles shuddered, picturing the endless mockery that could be generated by a group of teenagers riffing on the subject of an involuntary body swap. “No.”
“Fine.” Jenny sighed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they won’t realize anything is wrong.”
*
“Giles?” Cordelia was the first one into the library -- a strangely uncoordinated Cordelia, closely followed by a mincing Xander, an oddly quiet Willow, and an Oz who kept staring, wide-eyed, at his hands.
“He’s not here,” wailed Oz.
“Chill,” said Willow.
Xander sat down, crossing his legs, and folded his hands primly on one knee. “Well, then, we wait. Because I am not going home like this.”
*
There are a lot of definitions for ‘getting lucky’.
Genre: ‘Buffy: the Vampire Slayer’, Jenny/Giles, humour/romance. Jenny Calendar ficathon entry for nova25.
Spoilers: Season two, through ‘Ted’. The story is set between ‘Ted’ and ‘Bad Eggs’. See me get unnervingly specific with my surreal insertions!
Rating: PG, for the most part.
Description: Never visit the carnival on a Hellmouth. Reads a bit like the first part of a longer story, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ve already been tricked that way once.
***
“This is nowhere near as funny as you seem to think it is,” Giles said sternly, leaning against the library counter and trying to ignore the interminable itching in his nether regions. Scabs itch; that was, he thought ruefully, a simple fact of medical science. The fact that his latest such scab was in a region that civility dictated not be scratched in public did nothing to lessen the itch.
“Actually, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Buffy, with great and -- Giles thought -- slightly sadistic good cheer. “Teacher gets shot in the butt with a crossbow? Comedy gold. They should recreate it every semester as a reward for students with good grades.”
“Fascinating. Something that might actually induce you to study.”
Buffy either missed his withering tone or simply ignored it, barreling full-speed ahead down the yellow brick path of her fantasy. “I’d make the honour roll every semester if I got to pick the teacher. Oh! And if you qualified three times, you’d get to shoot Snyder!”
“Buffy--”
“We could sell souvenir photos to pay for repairing vampire damage. And I bet we’d have the best archery club in the state--”
“Buffy.”
The petite Slayer stopped babbling, blinking innocently at him. “What?”
Giles held out an axe. “Patrol.”
“But...”
“Patrol.”
“Don’t you need me to provide moral support for your recovery?” she asked, hopefully.
“Believe me, at this point, I will recover more quickly if you are elsewhere.” Perhaps China, he added, silently. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and encounter a new breed of demon to be slain.”
Buffy sighed, doing her best to sound put-upon, and snatched the axe out of his hand, muttering, “Spoil-sport,” as she headed for the door.
“Yes, that’s right,” he called after her. “I ruin everything.”
The library door swung shut on Buffy’s exit, and he was finally, blessedly alone.
Glancing furtively around, Giles allowed himself the satisfaction of a long and shameful scratch.
*
Jenny Calendar was privately of the opinion that the single most challenging elective to teach at a high school level was Computers. Your classes were evenly divided between people who’d been shunted over because they couldn’t handle basic algebra and budding hackers who truly felt that they’d earned an ‘A’ just because they could hack the school computers and cause them to print ‘Principle Snyder Blows Goats I HAVE PROOF’ on all the attendance sheets.
Actually, she was willing to be convinced on that one.
Between the sullen jocks and the James Bond villains of tomorrow, she was completely exhausted. And that didn’t even take into account the amount of grading she had to do before the morning. Jenny directed her best baleful glare on the pile of papers currently cluttering her desk. “Disappear,” she suggested. Maybe she’d get lucky.
The papers did no such thing. In fact, their essential solidity suggested, she’d be better off trying to make the sky turn green. They had no intention of disappearing before they’d had the chance to ruin her night.
She was still glaring at the papers when there was a cautious knock on the classroom doorframe, and she looked up to see the familiar, slightly stooped form of Rupert Giles walking towards the desk. He was, she noted with guilty amusement, still limping slightly.
Memo to me: if you bury a crossbow bolt in a guy’s behind, he’ll limp for at least three days, she thought, and had to bite back a peal of giggles before they burst loose and betrayed the incongruity of her thoughts to him. “Hello, Rupert,” she said.
“Hello, Jenny,” he said, with one of those shy, utterly endearing smiles that he only used when there were no students around -- and when he was genuinely happy to see her. He was smiling like that more and more these days.
Maybe they were starting to make progress.
“What’s up? Do we have demons in the basement? Any chance they’ll chew the wiring and get the school closed due to lack of power?”
“Now you sound like one of my students.”
“Heaven forbid,” she replied, dryly. “Seriously. What strange, eldritch force has driven you down into the deep, scary bowels of the computer lab? Did the naughty forces of darkness install AOL on your Encyclopedia Britannica?”
She’s even lovely when she makes no sense whatsoever, Giles thought. This was fortunate, given that she seemed to give up on making sense at least two-thirds of the time. “I believe I was looking for the instructor.”
“Really?” Jenny looked exaggeratedly from one side to the other, then flashed him a vivid smile. “I think you’ve found her.”
“Oh, good.” Eyeing the pile of papers-to-be-graded somewhat warily, he asked, “Are you busy tonight?”
Jenny knew full well that a good, respectable, responsible teacher would reply ‘Yes, I am, sorry’ and spend her evening alone with the cat, a container of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream, and the pile of exams. She knew that. Really.
“Not at all,” she replied, and smiled.
*
“Carnival,” said Jenny, around a mouthful of sticky blue cotton candy. “Good choice.”
“It seemed...” Giles paused, fumbling for a word. ‘Romantic’ wouldn’t do, even though one of the most romantic moments of his adolescence -- if you could call spotty skin, intentionally torn trousers and sticking his hand inside the jumper of a girl most of the other boys in his form called ‘Horseface’ particularly romantic -- had occurred on a blessedly broken Ferris wheel. ‘Charming’ applied to many things, but not to this dirty, somewhat down-at-heel midway, with its tired barkers and over-cooked mystery meat hot dogs. Really, ‘unsanitary’ and ‘provincial’ were the first things that came to mind. He settled for a lame, “...like your sort of thing.”
Jenny smiled approvingly. “Good answer, English. You’re learning. Ooh, look, they have a House of Mirrors! Let’s go!” And she was bounding towards the cheaply-built attraction, obviously expecting him to follow.
Ah, the things men do for love. Giles seized that opportunity to abandon his own cotton candy in a convenient (if slightly tarnished) trash barrel, and followed her.
Admission to the mirror maze was a dollar, each. Giles paid for both tickets, and was only marginally surprised when his change came in the form of Walking Liberty silver dollars, the tall form of the American ideal dominating the back of all three coins.
“You don’t see these often,” he commented to Jenny, showing her the coins as they stepped inside.
“If you see them at all,” she said, frowning. “Most places don’t use them as change. And look at the dates -- none of these are less than twenty years old.”
“Perhaps we’ve fallen through a hole in time,” Giles joked, aware almost immediately of how dangerously probable that actually was, given that they were attending a carnival located right above a Hellmouth. “Er. I’d like to retract that statement.”
“If I have to live through the seventies again, I’m kicking your ass,” Jenny said, amused. “You don’t want to see me with a poodle perm.”
Giles pondered this mental image. “No, you’re quite right. I don’t.”
Laughing, Jenny Calendar took his hand and led him into the mirror maze.
*
They stumbled back outside three hours later, both of them rumpled, filthy and furious-looking. The midway was long since abandoned, and the ticket-taker’s booth in front of the House of Mirrors was closed.
Jenny kicked off her low-heeled shoes, snapping at Giles, “I cannot for the life of me understand why you choose to wear these infernal things for any length of time. My knees may never recover.”
“Actually, those are my knees,” Giles -- Jenny -- replied, while marveling at the fact that English accents were apparently like minds: they went where the personality went. Hearing Giles’ accent coming out of her own body was jarring, and not particularly pleasant. “And I wear them because you like them.”
“After this, I’ll be happy if I never see another woman wearing shoes more elevated than slippers,” Jenny -- Giles -- mumbled, bending to massage her calves.
“Hey, at least my body can walk properly.”
“Given that you’re the one who shot me with the crossbow, I believe we can dismiss that argument as spurious,” Giles replied.
Jenny sighed. “Let’s not get mad, all right? You’re in my body, and I’m in yours. We’re going to have to deal with it. At least until we can find someone to grab and shake briskly.”
“We’re going to have to spend the night like this, aren’t we?” Giles asked bleakly.
“Yes. And unless you want to start a lot of fun rumours at school, we’re going to have to teach like this, too.” Giles stared at him in horror, and Jenny sighed. “I’m not happy about it either. I just don’t think we have a choice.”
“I won’t do it!”
“Then you’ll be listening to people talk about our elopement for the rest of the school year.”
Giles groaned, burying her face in her hands. Awkwardly, Jenny patted his own body on the back. “There, there,” he said. “Breathe.”
“I can’t teach computers!”
“Sure you can. I’ll help you with lesson plans. Or you can let Willow run the class for you. She’d kill for the chance.”
Giles lifted her head, eyes wide. “Willow must never know!”
“Giles...”
“Seriously. They would...” Giles shuddered, picturing the endless mockery that could be generated by a group of teenagers riffing on the subject of an involuntary body swap. “No.”
“Fine.” Jenny sighed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they won’t realize anything is wrong.”
*
“Giles?” Cordelia was the first one into the library -- a strangely uncoordinated Cordelia, closely followed by a mincing Xander, an oddly quiet Willow, and an Oz who kept staring, wide-eyed, at his hands.
“He’s not here,” wailed Oz.
“Chill,” said Willow.
Xander sat down, crossing his legs, and folded his hands primly on one knee. “Well, then, we wait. Because I am not going home like this.”
*
There are a lot of definitions for ‘getting lucky’.