"Impossibilities"

[ljs]

One more to grow on....

TITLE: "Impossibilities"
AUTHOR: Lori
RATING: Mature audiences (R-equivalent)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Joss Whedon, the Who, and John Donne
SUMMARY: A Giles/Anya pas de deux, beginning just after the Season Six episode "Flooded" and taking place in a universe just a step or two away from canon



Impossibilities

Perhaps the first nights will be the hardest, Giles thinks. Perhaps it will get better. But he’s worried that might be impossible.

It’s jetlag, heartache lifted, and the strange stirrings of new heartache which send him out of the Summers house into the night. He’s come back from England, from his old flat and his new job for the Council of Watchers, to find Buffy alive again. She’s a living miracle. She’s a sign of Willow’s darker magic.

But after that first bruising welcome in the Magic Box, Buffy hasn’t really listened to him - she runs when he asks her a hard question, or she expects him to answer it for her. After that first welcome, Willow hasn’t listened to him. He’s been given an uncomfortable temporary bed as his place to stay.

Also, his bloody head hurts. Come back to Sunnydale, get knocked unconscious.

He puts his hands in his pockets, curling his left hand around a stake just in case, and starts to walk. He keeps to the edges of the shadows as he goes.

The air is dry. That’s what he notices most after time back home. Sunnydale is all but desert when one strips away the suburban lawns and imported plants, transplanted and water-thirsty. It was raining when he left Bath for the train ride to Heathrow, and he rode through miles of green. The green he walks past now doesn’t belong.

Before he knows it, he finds himself at the Magic Box. Not really his any more, either - as Anya so trenchantly put it, he signed papers - but he still has his keys, and shuttered lights from inside shine in a simulacrum of home.

When he opens the door, he sees Anya at the table, surrounded by merchandise and wielding a dangerous-looking tool. "Anya, what are you doing here? It’s -" he checks his watch - "almost ten o’clock."

"And it’s almost Halloween, Giles!" She punctuates the statement by shooting the base of a candle with the... pricing gun, he now realizes. "The stock needs to be ready to be purchased by hordes of customers." But then she smiles at him. "You haven’t been gone that long. How did you forget one of the most important days in our retail calendar? Was it the most recent head-bump?"

"No. I just, er, forgot." He walks over to her and checks the stack of candles she’s already marked. His eyebrows rise. "That’s a bit of a price increase, isn’t it?"

"I surveyed the market. We’ve been undercharging." Gun-shot to the base of another candle. "And remember, what I make is also what you make. Profits for both partners."

"No, it’s your shop now." Unable to settle, he moves around restlessly, breathing the rich sage she’s burning for some inexplicable Anya-reason. He needs something to do with his hands. He needs something to do - "Your shop," he says again, "As you reminded me yesterday when you greeted me."

She sets the weapon down and says earnestly, "I didn’t mean it that way. I was just scared you’d take my place away from me. I need something I can actually say is mine, because... because I don’t have another." Her lips are too red and inviting in the lamplight, and he looks away. "But it’s still your store too. You just don’t get to tell me the price of slug candles any more."

His own laughter makes him feel strangely worse. He stands there, looking down at his empty hands.

Three gun-shots, hard and fast, and then the rattle of Anya’s words: "The bourbon is in the same place you left it, and in case you’re bored beyond alcohol, your guitar is in the storeroom."

He left his second guitar, he remembers, the cheap one that rarely stayed in tune. But sod it, his fingers are itching. "Thank you, Anya - if you wouldn’t mind my playing, that is. I can use the training room...."

"I’d like you to play out here. You have a surprisingly pleasant voice." She smiles but doesn’t look up. "And I’d like some bourbon too."

The stairs down to the storeroom are dark, even after he turns on the light, and he thinks about the Summers basement full of water. He looks at goods for sale, he thinks about the money Buffy needs. Then he finds his guitar and goes back upstairs into soft light and incense.

Anya’s already found the bourbon and two shot glasses and set a chair out for him. He pours them both a shot, and they toss it back together. He closes his eyes, letting the warmth curl through him, enjoying her soft exhalation after she swallows.

It takes him a minute to tune the instrument, maybe a bit longer because of the irregular, distracting percussion of the pricing gun. His fingers tighten the strings, loosen others, until the notes drop easily into the evening. He does another shot, and so does she - warmth, soft exhalation, a moment of ease. Then, without conscious thought, he begins to play. The chords fill the shop, and he closes his eyes and begins. "‘Can you see the real me, can you, can you....’"

The pricing gun falls silent, but he doesn’t open his eyes and he doesn’t stop singing.

When the song is done, he blinks himself back to Sunnydale and now. Anya is open-mouthed and leaning forward, elbows on knees and sharp chin propped on pretty hands. "That was beautiful, Giles. Who was it by?"

"Exactly," he says with a private smile, and pours himself another shot. The bourbon tastes even better after singing.

She makes an exaggerated noise of exasperation. "No, who?"

"Exactly," he says again, laughing out loud at her expression. "Sorry, sorry. The song was originally recorded by a band called the Who."

"So it’s literally by the Who. I missed a literal meaning." She beams at him. "Hey! Do you think that means I’ll master irony soon?"

When he laughs harder, she pulls a face, slams down her own third shot, and then picks up her retail weapon. Vengeance shimmers in her eyes, and he thinks of a thousand years gone - but he doesn’t move fast enough to get away, and she shoots his arm where his sleeve is rolled up. The sticker affixes itself just below his hidden tattoo. He stops laughing.

"Oops. That might have hurt, I didn’t mean to," she says, then puts her hand over the new mark. "I’m sorry. I was just-"

"It’s all right, Anya." He covers her hand with his, the warmth of the contact curling through him like the bourbon. He lets go. Awkwardly, searching for something to say: "So I now cost ten dollars. Oh dear, I’d always rather hoped I was worth more than that."

"You’re a bargain, Giles, somebody’s going to snap you up first thing," she says, with a sharp pat on the sticker. The adhesive pulls at his skin, and the sensation ripples over his entire body in the oddest way. "Anyhow, everyone knows price isn’t worth."

He has to smile. "Ah. Your koan?"

"No, simple understanding of market forces. Which reminds me I need to get back to work." She picks up the price-gun again and another candle. "Will it bother your singing if I keep shooting merchandise?"

"Not at all," he says, and he means it.

Relaxed now despite the pops of the gun, he plays his way through several other Who classics. Anya works on her own task, but she smiles at him at the end of each song. She appreciates "Mama’s Got a Squeezebox" in particular, says it shows the proper dedication and attitude in a man. He smiles back, and starts "Magic Bus."

His fingers and voice get tired after a while, however, and she finishes pricing her two boxes of candles. After they clean up the shop and put everything away, he walks her to Xander’s flat, makes sure she gets in safely - Xander is a shadow in the open doorway, saying something Giles can’t hear, and then she’s swallowed up inside.

He stands there for a moment or two in the dry night air, his hands in his pockets, before he walks back to the Summers house. He doesn’t take off the sticker until the next morning in the shower. Even so, it hurts.

................................................................

A few nights later, he needs his guitar again.

Buffy walked out on her job at the Magic Box that afternoon. He knows now that she was frustrated by whoever’s been testing her, that she didn’t leave after one immediate mistake as it seemed at the time, but what strikes him hard is that she’s still running. She’s still not talking to him. She’s still not listening.

After he gives her the cheque for the plumbing repair, she thanks him, hugs him in that bruising Buffy way, and tells him that Dawn likes it when things are easy. He’s well aware that it’s not Dawn’s emotion she’s expressing, and it disturbs him, even as he sympathizes.

And she hasn’t sat down with him to go over the budget and list of debts Anya so carefully prepared, although he’s asked several times.

He’s not staying at the Summers house any more - his back started to hurt after two nights on the sodding couch which he didn’t fit in the first place - but he doesn’t drive straight to his hotel when he leaves. Instead, he finds himself at the Magic Box, where there’s at least a simulacrum of home and his music.

The lamps are on in the shop. When he goes down to the storeroom to fetch his instrument, Anya sits in a morose heap on the cold floor, holding bits of destroyed mummy-hand. "Well, here’s two hundred and fifty dollars in little bitty unsaleable pieces," she says sadly.

The guitar can wait -- he sits down beside her on the floor and picks up a severed finger. There are still a few twitches in the thing, however, magic like phantom energy oozing out of the layers of wrapping, and he drops it again. Wiping his hands on his handkerchief: "Yes, more’s the pity. But the loss wasn’t Buffy’s fault, and no, Anya, we can’t charge her for it." He tells her the history of the spells and the tests Buffy’s had to endure over the past days.

At the end of his tale, she sighs. "That’s too bad. Nevertheless, it still comes out of our money."

"Yes, it does." He stretches out his legs and leans back on his hands, feels the slight unevenness of the floor under his palms, tips his head back to look up at the unfinished ceiling.

She smiles at him in his peripheral vision. "Well, maybe I’ll make so much at Halloween that we won’t miss it. Sell sell sell, yay!"

He says with his own sideways smile, "I’m hoping for a record-breaking day as well. Profits for partners, don’t you know."

She mimics his pose, stretching out her slim, stocking-clad legs and leaning back on her hands. The bits of broken mummy fall between them, still sparking with that phantom energy. He closes his eyes, but he hears her say, "Do you need money too, Giles? I mean, you’re paying to stay at your hotel, and I assume you’ve still got expenses in England. It’s like you’re bleeding money, except without the blood."

He wouldn’t share the information in the ordinary way, but she is his business partner - "Er, well, yes. And I also gave Buffy the money for the plumbing repair this evening, which does make it tight financially for me right now. When I get back to England, I’ll probably need to sell a piece or two of my collection. If the buyers I have in mind aren’t interested, I’ll commission you to do that...eBay thing you do." His smile comes with less effort than he expected. "I’ll start with the Ramadan effigy you love so much."

"Which belongs to the Magic Box anyway," she says tartly, then bumps him with her shoulder. This close he can smell her perfume, a classic citrus and floral scent, even over the magic and herbs. "Oh. You were teasing."

"No, I wasn’t." When she bumps him again, he says, "All right, perhaps a little."

They sit in comfortable silence for a while, and he can feel the tension-knots he didn’t know he was carrying begin to untangle themselves. Then she announces since she’s got to organise more material for the Halloween sale, he can play his guitar and sing to make her work more pleasant. He climbs up on a convenient table and begins - some Beatles this time as well as the Who, a little Elvis Costello for an astringent change - while she parcels out herbs and potion ingredients from their stock. He takes a break so they can argue about how much mandrake root they’ll need upstairs, and she tells him to go back to singing and stop interfering with retail genius, and there’s a little friendly throwing of burba root at each other. By the time his fingers are tired and she’s finished her self-assigned tasks, his tension is gone.

He walks her to her car - it is Sunnydale, after all, can’t be too careful-- and holds the door for her like the gentleman he was taught to be. When she says goodnight, the moonlight shimmers in her eyes, stronger than vengeance, and her perfume envelopes him again.

He doesn’t consider himself a man comfortable with the lyric mode, but as he drives to the hotel, he’s haunted by fragments of a poem he doesn’t quite remember -- Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root.... Something about the simplicity and imperative voice reminds him of Anya in moonlight.

The next day he looks up the poem in the fucking disgrace that passes for the Sunnydale Public Library. It’s one of John Donne’s, and the bitter underside of the lyric claims that all women are unfaithful. Giles thinks of the trust shining from Anya’s face when she looks at him; he thinks of Xander in a doorway, pulling her inside. This poem isn’t about her at all, except in its focus on impossible things. If he knows anything, he knows that.

He closes the book with a snap so loud that the librarian shushes him, and he takes the long way back to the Magic Box. Once there, he tries to say something to Buffy, but she walks away. Willow doesn’t let him get that close at all.

The tension is back in his shoulders, in his gut, but there are too many bloody people in the shop now. He can’t let himself go downstairs to look at the guitar.

....................................................................

Halloween exhausts him, angers him, stretches him thinner than he thought he could go, and late that night he goes to the Magic Box. It will be a comfortable place to hide, he thinks, a solitary place. After the day’s announcement - he wants to polish his glasses again at the thought of it - Anya is the last person he expects to find there.

But there she is, polishing the counter with efficient strokes of her cloth, and she smiles when he jangles his keys on the way in. "There you are," she says, in strange echo of his thoughts.

"Anya, hello." He stands at the door, suddenly too tired to come in further, too tangled in emotion. "Why aren’t you celebrating your engagement with Xander? More private celebration, I mean."

The cloth pauses. She says, "We’ve been engaged for five months. Today was just the day he decided to tell everybody." After one last circle, she snaps the cloth in the air and then drops it somewhere he can’t see. Her engagement ring catches the light when she moves. "We had announcement-sex, he fell asleep, and then I took a shower and came back to prep for the-"

"Post-holiday clearance, right." He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. There might still be a little vamp dust in the corners.

Suddenly she’s beside him, her arm around his waist. "Is this delayed shock? Did Buffy forget to tell us you got hit again? Because you look terrible, like you’re going to fall down if I breathe wrong."

"I dusted a few vamps this evening. I had to discipline Dawn. And all that after your slave-driving here all day." He makes himself smile at her. "I’m very, very tired."

"Which is why you came here, instead of going to your hotel? That happens to me sometimes, you know, I’m tired and driving and I think I’m going one way and then wham, I’m somewhere else I didn’t mean to go." He knows she’s talking to cover the fact she’s pulling him to the table despite his stumbles, and on her last words she drops him into a chair.

He settles down, stretches out, looks up at the ceiling as if it hides the answers to all his questions. He has the most gut-wrenching feeling that he already knows the answers, and none of them will make him happy.

Dawn likes things when they go easy, Buffy said. Nothing’s ever easy. He’s not going to be able to stay in Sunnydale.

A box lands on the tabletop with a thump, and then Anya drops into the chair next to him. She begins to go through the box, bringing various things out and laying them in front of him. "Damaged goods," she says, "I have to decide whether to sell them tomorrow or not." A torn mass-market paperback on astrology, a worry-stone with its edge knocked off, a cracked crystal ball -

This he picks up. It’s small enough to fit in the hollow of his hand, cool and smooth except for the deep line almost bisecting it. He turns it this way and that, catching the light as Anya’s ring does. He doesn’t see anything inside it that he doesn’t already know.

"Do you want that?" Anya asks suddenly, closer than he thought. She’s smiling a little anxiously - so different from the painful, glorious beams during the announcement and the celebration at the Summers’. "You can have it. We’ve lost so much this retail season, what’s one more little loss."

"Thank you, I’d like it very much," he says, and he throws it up in the air and then catches it. Even that much movement makes him hurt all over.

She’s stopped what she’s doing so that she can inspect him. "What did you mean earlier, you had to discipline Dawn?"

"Er. Well." He feels vaguely disloyal for saying anything, but - "Buffy didn’t feel up to speaking to Dawn about the danger into which she put herself and the worry and trouble she caused, so she asked me to do it."

"But that’s not your job, Giles, just like paying for plumbing isn’t," she says. He looks at her. "Which, okay, obviously you knew." With a scrape of the chair she’s up, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder. "You need a shot of bourbon, possibly more. I’ll be driving you home anyway, you’re sort of dizzy and low-functioning and I don’t want to read in the paper about your battered dead body found in a culvert somewhere, so you can drink as much as you want."

"Thank you, Anya," he says, and she smiles before she disappears behind him.

He stares at the crystal ball, rolls it around in his fingers so the crack isn’t visible. "‘I can see for miles and miles, I can see for miles and miles, I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles,’" he sings softly.

"That’s very pretty, if repetitive," she says, coming back with the bourbon and one shot glass. "Who is it by?"

"Exactly," he says.

She grins. "Ha! I get it this time." She pours him the shot herself, watches him throw it back, and pours him another before she sits back down. Then she props her chin on her hands, elbows on the table, and stares at the tabletop.

Something’s required of him, he thinks through exhaustion and a light buzz and, all right, arousal. He’s tired enough to admit privately that he wants Anya, no, craves her, although he’s not bloody tired enough to let her know. She’s a faithful woman, and she trusts him. And since he considers himself her friend now, he makes himself say, "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing. Not a thing. No, sir. Nosirree bob." She makes a face. "Who’s Bob, anyway?"

"I have no idea." He touches her hand with the shot glass. "What’s wrong, Anya?"

"Almost five months. It just hit me tonight." The words are flat and hollow. "Five months I couldn’t say anything. It just... but I’m being silly, aren’t I? Because I have this gorgeous ring, and he announced it eventually in his own damn time, and when I ask he always says he does want to get married, and now we can get on with the house-buying and baby-making and other elements of marriage," she says quickly, as if she’s trying to make herself believe it.

He has his own reasons for doubting Xander’s commitment - he saw and heard the younger man’s panic all too clearly - but maybe he’s wrong. Maybe his inability to help the Scoobies extends to Xander too. So he says, "Certainly. And by the way, Rupert is a good name for a baby."

"No, it’s-" she begins, as she had done earlier, then looks at him. "Oh, come on! You’re not a Rupert, you’re a Giles. Don’t be silly."

"No, Anya, I’m Rupert."

She’s closer to him, or maybe his vision’s just blurry, no, her scent envelopes him in warmth and citrus and flowers. "Okay. Then a Rupert wouldn’t get pushed down in the schoolyard, he’d do the pushing."

"Bloody well right."

Her smile is even closer, her mouth slick and red. He drinks his bourbon to drown his longing, but it doesn’t help. She says, "But I bet a Rupert would eat library paste."

"Well, obviously. It‘s delicious."

Her crow of laughter delights him, warms him better than the bourbon. As with the bourbon, he’s colder when it’s gone. He’s not going to be able to stay.

As Anya drives him to the hotel - not ‘home,’ he corrects her, and she gazes at him with raised eyebrows - he slouches in the front seat and turns the cracked crystal ball over and over in his hands. The price sticker’s still on it. He leaves it on.

.........................................................

They left the Magic Box unlocked when they went after Buffy, Dawn, and Sweet - but as the spell begins to dissolve after the last song, neither he nor Anya can rest until they make it secure again. It’s the only thing to which he has a key any more, Giles thinks.

Xander walks with them, chatting nervously about the singing, making bad jokes, casting uneasy glances at unnaturally quiet Anya and at Giles, who is repressing his own words. The anger he’d release would do no one any good.

But when Anya tells Xander to stay outside, she and Giles go into the Magic Box alone.

The shop’s unharmed, Giles sees at first glance. There’s not much to do to make it ready for the night - Anya checks on her beloved cash register, he tests all the doors, and they meet again by the front door. He makes himself smile at her, and then his hand goes to the light switches.

Her hand covers his. She’s very close to him, her eyes dark and hurt, sour fear-sweat mixing with her perfume. "So, today was a bad day, wasn’t it?"

He thinks of, and discards, several pathetic attempts at humour. "Yes, it was."

Quietly - she’s so lovely, he thinks without meaning to - she says, "Xander caused all this song-and-dance and death because he doesn’t believe we’ll have a happy ending. But he hasn’t talked to me about that lack of faith, even though I’ve asked repeatedly. In fact, he lied."

Faith means little, he wants to say. He thinks of Buffy, singing what she hasn’t told him. Even after the secret was out, she walked away from them all, from him; he couldn’t find her after the last song ended, she’d slipped away. If Buffy began her silence because of a wish to protect them, him, it isn’t for that reason any more.

When he gave her his Watcher-advice tonight, she walked away too. She always has walked her own path, he knows that, but it hurts more now. Perhaps it wasn’t good advice anyway. Buffy’s not listening; Willow and now Xander fall back on dark magic. Maybe he’s lost what voice he used to have. Maybe he never had it.

His hand underneath Anya’s moves, but only so he can grasp hers more firmly. Warmth curls through him at the contact. "Buffy hasn’t talked to me, either, even though I’ve asked repeatedly. She just...hasn’t."

"They want it to be easy," Anya says fiercely. "What kind of idiot thinks that? Nothing’s easy in this dimension. Except possibly making money."

"Not even that." He’s so tired. "Nothing’s easy, but we just go on."

She holds onto him more tightly, and for a long moment they gaze at each other. Sweet’s spell is gone now, magic lost. He can hear a rush of traffic outside, passersby talking, the usual hum of the Sunnydale night, but the Magic Box is a safe and quiet place. Anya is so unbearably lovely.

Then she sings just one phrase in her unique voice - "‘No, I’ll never tell.’" She folds her hands together. "That was the book number Xander and I sang, about all the scary stuff we’re not talking about. There’s a lot more I haven’t been talking about that didn’t make the song, either." She gazes at him. "What was yours, Rupert?"

He looks away from her before singing just one phrase. "‘Wish I could stay.’" He’s not singing about Buffy this time.

They turn off the lights together and lock up. She goes off with Xander. Hands in his pockets, Giles watches her walk away, then stands there alone in the dry Sunnydale night for a moment or two before going back to his hotel. Rolling the cracked crystal ball in his palm, he thinks about Buffy and what he wishes he could do for her, about Willow and Xander. He calls the airline and makes his reservation for a one-way flight back home.

In the middle of the night he wakes himself up with a memory he almost missed: Anya called him Rupert. He imagines her calling him that when he’s buried inside her, warmth and strength clutching him greedily as he moves, nails in his back holding him there. The thought makes him hard, and his hand twitches at his side, ready to give himself bitter, temporary release.

He doesn’t do anything about it, just lies there until the craving fades like Sweet’s spell. It would be easier if it were a spell, but he knows it’s not. Nothing’s easy.

..............................................

A few nights later, on the plane back to England, he holds himself still and quiet so the hurt doesn’t spill out around him everywhere. He makes himself think about the new job instead. He’s talked with Robson on the phone a couple of times, and they’ll make their first explorations in a day or two. He’ll need to do some reading before they go, he hasn’t had the proper texts with him in Sunnydale.

The image of Buffy, accusatory and wounded, breaks into his thoughts like a foot kicking out a door. The image of Willow, who’s lied to them all, who’s manipulated them with magic, comes next. They haven’t listened to him. Won’t listen.

Christ, he can still taste Anya on his lips, feel her against him, her leg coming up to caress his thigh and higher, her hands in his hair. He hears in memory that soft "Don’t leave me." It had been so fucking easy to give in when they didn’t know who they were.

He can still envision her gazing longingly at him when they did know, when magic had gone.

He looks out the window. If it were daylight, he could see for miles and miles and miles and miles. It’s dark now, of course.

His fingers move like he’s playing his guitar.

........................................................

"I think that spell should do it, Robson," he says into his work mobile, as he opens the door to his flat in Bath. "The Cartae demons in mine disappeared well enough, and I sealed the circle before I left."

"Yes, mine as well. First two done, then." Robson’s voice sounds as weary as Giles feels - but then, each of them has been up all night, each with his own stone circle to watch and guard. The West Country has seen a strange increase in demon-summoning lately, tied to ancient sites of power. "Shall I shoot you my report when it’s finished?"

His boots are earth-encrusted, he sees. As he struggles to take them off, he tells Robson that sounds good, he’ll do the same. Next full moon, they’ll watch and guard another set.

After he hangs up and dumps the boots on the front mat, he sets the mobile on his dining room table next to the bowl holding his cracked crystal ball. Then he heads into his kitchen, where grey morning light washes in through a frosted window. It’s cold in here, the radiator’s playing up again. Tea, he thinks - he had a greasy and satisfying fry-up in a café not far from the train station, but he’s still got a powerful thirst.

As he waits for the tea to brew, he stares absently at the British Museum calendar on the wall. Two weeks since he left from Sunnydale, two weeks since he heard anything. A letter from a party interested in purchasing the Ramadan effigy lies underneath the empty dates. He couldn’t trust himself to ask Anya about selling it.

The tea is hot on his tongue, almost enough to burn. While he’s waiting for it to cool down, he checks his answerphone - one message. He hits Play, and listens as he takes another sip.

Beeps and whistles and bloody whatever, then Anya’s sharp voice: "Hi, Rupert. Just thought you’d want to be caught up on things back here. We’ve had two excellent weeks of sales, the Halloween push is carrying right into the pre-Thanksgiving frenzy. Dawn’s got a broken arm or something because Willow went on a magic rampage. Buffy’s not talking to anybody, she’s even weirder than before, and don’t even ask about Spike. And, um, I gave the expensive and barely depreciated engagement ring back to Xander. We agreed we don’t love each other enough to stay together, which is convenient because I want you more. Bye, talk to you soon!"

It’s not until he stumbles over his boots on his sprint out the door that he realises he needs his shoes. Oh, and his passport.

............................................................

He stands outside the closed Magic Box and runs the fingers of one hand through his hair, although he’s not sure how much improvement that will actually be. It’s been a long day, and he didn’t sleep much on the plane.

He called Buffy between planes in Los Angeles, told her that he’d see her tomorrow for breakfast so they could get some of their problems sorted. She offered her couch again, but he told her he had somewhere else to stay.

Anya wasn’t at her flat when he called, and the Magic Box voice mail picked up when he called here. But behind the shutters lamps burn like home, he can hear music inside, and he’s still got his keys.

When he goes inside, she’s sitting cross-legged on the table, watching the door. An unopened bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses gleam beside her, not nearly as bright as her smile. She displays both of her pretty hands, bare of rings. "Hi, Rupert! You made it!"

"Hello, Anya." He’s afraid he’s going to crack from too much emotion. To cover it, he locks the door behind him and then drops his bags on the floor. Only then does he identify what’s playing: "You Better You Better You Bet." Grinning, he says, "Who is that song by?"

"Exactly," she crows, and then opens her arms. "Are you going to get over here, or am I going to have to come get you?"

He gets over there.

The bourbon and the shot glasses are the first things to fall. He hears the crash from a distance, but it means nothing. As she lies back on the table and he crawls on top of her, he gazes down at brightness and beauty. "Now, where were we before we were so untimely interrupted by reality?" he says.

It’s good deep kisses that leave her mouth even redder than usual, her hands removing his glasses and then his jumper and T-shirt so he can feel her soft breasts against him, him throwing her dress and lingerie somewhere and sliding his fingers inside her wetness so she comes for the first time, her fingers wrapping around his cock and pumping until he groans, and then it’s wild kisses, skin against skin, his knees friction-burning but he doesn’t care, the creaks of the table on every stroke of his and every twisting counter-thrust of hers, her cries, his moans. It’s all so good and deep and hot.

When she seizes around him again, she gasps, "Oh God, Rupert," and digs her nails into his back. It’s far better than anything he imagined, and he bites her shoulder as he comes at last.

Then they lie there wrapped together, sweaty, breathing hard, but silent. Roger Daltrey has long since stopped singing.

Giles kisses the mark he’s made on her, and he pushes her damp hair from her face. She is beauty and brightness even more now, he thinks. "We’ve made a bit of a mess, darling," he says.

"An excellent mess, despite the loss of a costly bottle of Booker’s." She curls into him, her hands petting the small wounds she’s made in his back.

"Excellent indeed." He breathes her in for another moment, then forces himself to pull out and roll them over onto their sides. The table is extremely sticky. "Er, should we get started on cleaning this up before we move on? I don’t want to fall asleep on you, and it’s been...quite a day."

She kisses his neck, licks a little. "Yep. Efficiency, that’s us."

They get off the table - he’s moving rather stiffly now, it’s all catching up to him - and begin to pick up clothes and debris. He won’t let her walk with bare feet because of the broken glass, so he finds her shoes first; he is rewarded with the sight of her naked except for high heels, bending to collect her things. She smiles over her shoulder at him. "By the way, I’ve put clean sheets on my bed for us, so we’ll have to shower together first."

He’s too tired to do more than appreciate the idea intellectually, but he smiles back. "Efficiency, that’s us."

But after the shop is tidy, as they make their way to the door, she stops him with her hand on his. "Rupert," she says carefully, "besides showering and sleep, what comes next?"

He drops his bags again and gathers her in his arms. Just as deliberately: "Tomorrow I have to speak with Buffy and Willow, begin to work again with them. You have your work here, the, er, ‘pre-Thanksgiving frenzy.’ We have to think about Xander, too. Despite your great good sense in breaking the engagement-" she nods -"we need to consider his feelings when appearing in public, at least for a while. It’s only fair."

"Yes. That’s fair, and saves on the potential for vengeance wishes." She kisses his shoulder. "And then what? It appears you’ve thought about it, which pleases me. Good planning makes me feel better."

"We’ll figure it out. We have so many competing responsibilities...." He thinks of Buffy, then England and his ongoing job, then the Magic Box which has so sheltered them. "But there’s a magic shop in Bath. Its owners are older than bloody Merlin, they might be persuaded to sell up."

When she gazes at him, he sees the thousand-year-old inside the youthful body, the person who’s seen and dealt all manner of darkness. "Rupert, you know damn well it’s not going to be that easy."

"No. Nothing is. But we’ll figure it out together," he says again, and leans down to kiss her. It’s good and soft and yes, so impossibly easy.

Her eyes are shining when he lifts his head, and he thinks again of the Donne poem and its impossible things. Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are....

"Caught you, Anya," he says.
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