Post-post-mortem.
"When Buffy stops smiling, she seems a little more herself. Her skin isn't stretched so tight over all that fragile bone, and Giles can see a faint resemblance to the round-faced, silly, young girl he first knew. Buffy looks like her own distant cousin.
It's been happening for ages, Giles realizes as she tells him, lightly and laughingly, about the nightmares that won't let her sleep. That girl, that Buffy, has been dying for years. Back before her leap off the tower, before her mother's death, before two lovers in succession left her, that girl's grave was waiting. Even before she killed Angel, perhaps; long before she went to Angel's bed and made him a monster, it had begun.
When a Slayer is called, the death knell begins."
-- kindkit as Giles in gilesozrpg, the back to Sunnydale thread.
It's been happening for ages, Giles realizes as she tells him, lightly and laughingly, about the nightmares that won't let her sleep. That girl, that Buffy, has been dying for years. Back before her leap off the tower, before her mother's death, before two lovers in succession left her, that girl's grave was waiting. Even before she killed Angel, perhaps; long before she went to Angel's bed and made him a monster, it had begun.
When a Slayer is called, the death knell begins."
-- kindkit as Giles in gilesozrpg, the back to Sunnydale thread.