The Coldest Winter We Ever Spent, Part VII: Labor Day (7 of 8)
Title: The Coldest Winter We Ever Spent... (Part VII: Labor Day)
Author:
protoneoromanic
Pairing: Buffy/Giles; hostile:Giles/Angel, Joyce/Original Vampire Character; background: Buffy/Angel, Giles/Jenny, Willow/Oz, Lily/Ricky; slight hints at others
Rating: Explicit/ NC-17
Word Count Part VI: 3439
Trigger Warnings: RAPE, torture, underage sex, intergenerational sex, miscarriages, hostile sexual activity, extremely graphic violence
A/N: Ratings, Pairings, and Warnings apply to the work as a whole, and are added as soon as I know they're coming.
Beta:
gilescandy (Although there is only so much even she can do for a stubborn old thing like me!)
Legal Notice: This non-commercial artistic activity meets Fair Use requirements
A/N: "Wheel never stops turning.... You're up, you're down ... it doesn't change what you are." BtVS 6.15 "As You Were"
“So you're the infamous Mr. Giles,” the girl smirked, her tone an odd mixture of amused, impressed, and ostentatiously lascivious. “Surprised old Boneybutt left me alone with you. She must be slipping.”
Faith was leaned back in a position that could have been accurately described as being very slightly seated on the second reading table, were it not for the fact that her feet still rested mostly on the floor, though most of her weight was evidently being born by her hands, which gripped the wooden surface to either side of her.
Mr. Giles suppressed a sigh. “I'm sure,” he muttered without looking up, pretending to be too engrossed in the serious business of reorganizing everything Gale had organized while he was out to have noticed her one way or another. He supposed her positioning was meant to convey the message that she had not the slightest care how she was perceived or whether she was noticed by anyone... whilst incidentally thrusting her hot-pink tube top encased breasts as far out into the collective face of the word as possible.
God, what a tiresome child, trying so desperately to paint herself as the invulnerable street-sophisticate, all in broad brushstrokes and vivid colors. He wished she could be made to go away. All he'd asked Gale to do was to drive him to the library as he was still not medically cleared for that task and wouldn't be for another week. As much as it pained him to ask her for even that much, he hadn't been able to live with the thought of walking into the library on the very day students were due to arrive without having seen what all she'd done to the place and having a chance to undo it. But though that task was every bit as necessary as he had feared, he still found himself wishing he'd taken the opposite course.
“Guess she really, really didn't want to miss that picnic,” Faith was saying, still desperate to 'casually' engage him in conversation.
“He's the mayor,” Giles pointed out shortly, still without looking up. “It isn't as though she could have politely refused.” The girl shrugged, frowning a little. He didn't suppose there'd be any profit in trying to explain to her the concept of a breach of protocol. And he certainly didn't intend to risk slipping into a discussion of the related topic of breaches of ethics.
“So how come we're here and not there?” she challenged in a tone of thinly feigned innocence, tilting her head and smiling mockingly, moving the toes of one foot 'idly' in a circle as if unaware of the attention she was calling to her toned and tanned legs, bare from thigh to sandal in her tiny denim shorts. The ingénue playing the jade playing the ingénue, bloody priceless. If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought Gale had left her with him as a punishment, an overdose of his own medicine. But it was all too clear that her real purpose had been to avoid whatever deeds of embarrassment Faith would have found it necessary to commit in order to call attention to herself at such a very public gathering.
“Fetch me the box of books sitting on the left side of the desk in my office,” he ordered her brusquely. Faith sniffed, stood to her full height and crossed her arms. Giles looked at her severely over the tops of his glasses.
“Whatever,” Faith declared. With a theatrical shrug and a roll of the eyes, she complied. “I bet you didn't talk to Buffy like this when she was 'sorting your books' for you,” she muttered, 'under her breath' (but quite intelligibly) as she walked toward the tiny inner room. Giles restrained himself from pointing out that she was not Buffy, finding it much less indecorous not to have heard what she'd said.
~~~~
“Good morning! Would you like to try our classic Labor Day picnic special? Fried chicken, corn on the co-”
“Just a coffee, thanks,” the twitchy young man with the thick Irish accent cut Buffy off shortly, relieving her of the burden of acting cheerful.
Buffy didn't stay relieved long. There was something about the slight stranger that unsettled her, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. Until she did. “God!” she spat, exasperated. “Why can't you people-or whatever you are-give me some room. I mean, does every last one of you have a death wish or something?” Buffy couldn't sense most demons in the same uncanny way that she could vampires, but she had killed enough of them, and enough different kinds, to have a pretty good idea what most of them smelled like in the various stages of panic and dread. And this guy was sweating some kind of inhuman eau de anxiety that was not subtle.
And it was getting not-subtler. “Wha-de-who-how did you know?” his terrified stammer ended in a harsh, but no less terrified, whisper. “Who are you?”
Buffy stood with her hand on her hip (well, okay, on her very slight love-handle) appraising him critically. “You really don't know?” she asked, more tired of the unbelievable but true than disbelieving. “Then, what the hell are you doing here?” Even though they were speaking quietly, a few heads turned in their direction. Buffy set the coffee pot on the table and sat down across from him in his booth.
“Name's Doyle,” he more or less apologized, offering his hand.
Buffy crossed her arms. “That's not what I asked,” she reminded him pointedly. “Talk fast. This is a humans only establishment.”
“I'll have you know, I'm very much human!” Doyle insisted indignantly, before adding, quite sheepishly and with what he obviously hoped was a disarming smile, “On my mother's side. Look,” he added, after a moment's reflection, “I'm brand new in town, and I don't rightly know the things 'everybody knows' yet, so if I've intruded on some secret magical realm disguised as a greasy spoon... you know, all apologies, I just... who are you?”
Buffy sighed and rolled her eyes. 'Demon' though he may have been, this guy didn't exactly give off a 'deadly threat to humanity' vibe, just an other than entirely human smell. “I'm Buf- Anne... Winters, Vampire Slayer, retired. But not so retired that a can't still thrash any vampire, demons and forces of darkness that come around bothering me where I live and work, do we understand each other?”
“Oh,” Doyle said, evidently quite surprised, and then, suddenly, terribly relieved. “It's you I was sent here to find, then. 'A lost champion.' Someone to help the helpless. You're the one... my destiny!”
“No,” Buffy said, getting up from the table. “I'm really, really not. I'm not anybody's 'destiny'. Especially not some moon-faced, hero-wanna-be, poster boy for the positive portrayal of Irish demons in American media.” Buffy-no Anne, Anne, damnit!-turned to walk back into the kitchen to wash her hands and carry on with her very normal, perfectly respectable, work. “Don't let the door hit you in the ass,” she told the pitiful demonling, walking away without looking back.
~~~~
“The copy machine in the office is broken,” Jenny announced abruptly upon entering the library, somehow folding both a hostile greeting and a grudging apology into that one tiny bit of exposition. All the while, she was looking askance at Faith where she sat cross-legged on a table polishing her toe nails with an air of superhuman boredom.
Jenny! Giles's heart lurched unsteadily towards her then stopped short, hard enough to get whiplash. “By all means,” he said stiffly, with a perfunctory gesture in the direction of the copier in his inner office. He quickly found some mindless sorting task for an excuse to sit down. He was doing a fairly good job of concealing his emotions, he thought, though he hadn't quite sorted out what all of them were. He'd been told, of course, that she'd been released from hospital shortly after he'd arrived there himself. But seeing her here like this... for the first time since that terrible night in the ambulance... Did she even remember?
He didn't ask if he could ride with her. He just climbed aboard with such assurance that the ambulance crew were off and rolling without a thought of stopping him. It helped that he managed to hold her hand and keep her calm while, at the same time, staying out of their way. He'd had a little practice at this sort of thing. “Rupert, Rupert,” she whispered. “I'm not ready to go yet. Not without...”
“Shush, you're fine. Darling, you're fine,” he'd assured her. The endearment came to his lips automatically, without the mediation of thought. “You're not going anywhere but to hospital.”
“No,” Jenny shook her head, “Don't lie to me, don't comfort me. There are things that need to be said.” For the first time it occurred to him that he should not be here at this moment, that he should have stayed with Buffy, to vouch for her and back her up if the police became suspicious of her 'eye witness' account of the 'unidentified male' shooter. For the first time it occurred to him that he might be witnessing a murder. To have left Buffy, at such a time as this, could hardly be justified as the act of a lover, let a lone a Watcher, never mind the father of her unborn child. Yet here he was, with Jenny, dying in this moment.
“Rupert, I love you,” Jenny declared with quiet intensity. No, he should not be here. “Or at least... I loved you. I should have told you... I should have told you...” her eyelids fluttered shut. 'I loved you, too, you know,' stuck in his throat along side 'yes, you bloody well should have!' Whichever 'should have' she'd meant. A fine time now to talk of love! The whole thing was so very far past ruined.
A fact that had only gotten truer over the intervening months, Giles reminded himself firmly. He was glad she was alive. He could allow himself that much. For Buffy's sake as well as everyone else's. Anything more than that was... He was lucky to be alive and to have, as yet, been given no worse penance than to remain Buffy's official Watcher so that whatever continued to go wrong between now and the time she could be persuaded to return to duty would be on his watch and could be counted against him at the reckoning that was still inevitably to come. He ought to be counting his blessings. And getting back to the business of finding Buffy.
Suddenly, horribly, Giles realized that he did have a compelling reason to interact with Jenny at a level somewhat deeper than pointing her towards the nearest copying machine. “Faith,” he said, trying to sound causal. She tensed with eagerness to be directed, but didn't allow herself to straighten from her lounging posture to a degree that might have been taken for an admission that she was paying attention. “Go over to the cafeteria and ask them if they have any milk crates they're not using. Bring me back about a half a dozen if you can.”
Faith gave him a look. When he gave her directions that were clearly to the far side of campus, the look deepened. “Sure you don't need me to jog to Fondren and back?” she asked, “Give you even more quality time with...” she gestured slightly with her face and eyes towards the inner office.
“Just the milk crates, thanks,” he said stiffly. “Though you might as well get yourself some milk, as well,” he added dryly, “good for growing children, you know.”
“Yeah, well, I'm not the one growing children,” Faith retorted with a smile that was somehow both intimate and unkind. Giles stared at her, stone faced, expressing nothing but his firm expectation that at any moment she would go and do as she'd been told. With a minimum of obligatory groans and eye rolls, she did.
He walked quietly back to where Jenny stood, hunched over the copier, giving it her undivided attention as it did what it did and there was nothing she could do to speed it up. “Not celebrating the Holiday?” he asked from the doorway.
“Rupert don't do this,” she said plaintively, warningly, without looking up.
“Do what?” he said with innocence more overemphasized than feigned exactly. He wasn't trying to rekindle anything with Jenny, not even friendship, as such, whatever Faith thought. But, of course, he did want something from her, and they both knew it. Which, under the circumstances, was uninnocent enough. “I only wanted to erm... ask you erm... ask you about your summer... well, uh... as it might relate to... well the erm... the forces of darkness being ever a mutual danger to... to all of us, and each of us, well our various talents being...”
Jenny's body language was inpatient, though she still refused to look at him. He could hardly blame her. Somehow he was finding it insurmountably difficult to get to the point. What he had meant to ask suddenly seemed too much like interrogating her, with a possibility of ultimately accusing her of something. Which wasn't exactly what he meant to do. Apart from anything else, it was the wrong move socially, or politically or whatever you wanted to call it. A step away from the direction of shoring up alliances, however uneasy, among those few residents of Sunnydale even partly inclined or equipped to fight the forces of evil.
Jenny sighed and turned to face him at last. Regret and and hostility struggled in her eyes. “I spent my summer vacation recovering from being shot in the stomach by a pregnant woman half my age over a guy,” she reminded him bitingly. “Sorry, but it's still a little hard for me to talk about. I like to pretend I still have s shred of dignity left somewhere.”
Giles blinked a little in the face of her scorching reply. “That's not... I wouldn't say...” he stammered. Buffy had been possessed, of course, but still, Jenny's hard distillation of the facts contained enough truth that it was as hard to dismiss as it was to stomach.
“My own fault,” she reasoned bitterly, turning back to the copier to load more papers. “I should have...” she smiled a sad, cryptic smile, “set better boundaries for myself.”
~~~~
“No, Pete,” Anne repeated impatiently, casting a wary-of-being-publicly-embarrassed eye toward the three way-past-lunch-but-not-yet-dinner patrons scatter throughout the diner. “Still no. Always no. I don't know how many ways to say it. I do not want to be your date to your mother's wedding!” She tried to move as tactfully as possible around him to get to the time clock and officially end her shift. But he kept staying in her way. Somehow he looked both pissed and crestfallen. “It's not you...” she tried to explain. And then he was just pissed.
“Is it that guy?” he demanded. “That British guy? The one that knocked you up?”
Anne straightened her back, seeming to grow a foot rather than a mere quarter inch. It was her turn to be pissed. “He told you that!?!” she demanded. “Gi-he actually...”
“Not in so many words,” Pete admitted, softening altogether. “I just, when I gave him the bit about you being an older lady with a kid, he misunderstood and kind of started freaking out, and...”
“Oh boy,” Anne moaned, holding onto a table for support... or maybe for something to squeeze in frustrated rage. From the look on her face it was kind of hard to tell. It got a little easier when a piece of the solid wood tabletop came off in her hand, and she threw it hurriedly to the floor... hard enough that it zinged off a table leg and knocked over a chair. She looked at once terrified and terrifying. Pete instinctively flinched back from her, which only seemed to upset her more. “You know what... I gotta...” she stammered and ran out, pulling her apron and name tag off and throwing them to the floor behind her.
By the time it dawned on Pete what she'd meant to convey by discarding these items, his fear had cooled and his anger heated up enough for him to be able to shout after her, at the only still slightly swinging door, “Hey! That uniform's mine too, you little two-bit, jail-bait whore!”
~~~~
“See this, this right here, is why I can't talk to you!” Jenny shouted.
“I only asked you if you were being careful!” Giles tried not to shout back.
“Wow, nice choice of words there, G,” Faith interjected with vicious amusement, swinging her bare legs from the edge of the table.
“Oh... go... jog to Fondren and back, why don't you!?!” he very much shouted, whirling in her direction. “Can't you see no one wants you're spectacularly uninformed opinion!?!”
“Yeah,” Faith half snarled, “Whatev',” though she folded in on herself a little, like a kicked mutt, if he had bothered to notice. “Tell Mrs. Marlboro Light I went for a walk.”
“How can you talk to her that way, Rupert?” Jenny was already scolding him before the door had even closed behind Faith.
“Don't change the subject!” he shot back, too angry at the moment to take the opportunity for a step back. “We were talking about Buffy not-!” Giles spat a curse, took a deep breath, and corrected himself much more quietly, holding his voice steady in the face of his abject mortification, “We were talking about Willow.”
~~~~
Buffy sprinted from the diner. Tears streaked her vision. She didn't see, know, or caring where she was going. Until she ran smack into the back of a demon, who was talking animatedly to a tall blond girl, trying to shove a piece of paper under her nose and convince her of something. “If you don't listen and come with me right now,” he'd been saying, “you'll be dead by- Oy! Hold on there, ma-! M-ma'am?” he stammered, realizing who had bumped into him.
The girl had been cringing away from Doyle into the arms of a young man who had run out of a nearby pawnshop to see what was going on. Now she turned and looked at Buffy (still clinging to her apparent boyfriend) with an oddly catlike expression, suddenly swinging from much to hysterical to much too calm under the circumstances. “Do I know you from somewhere?” she asked, “Hey! Aren't you Buffy Summers?”
Panicked, Buffy realized she did know the girl. She was one of Ford's damned fool followers, still following his example, finding herself another demon to get killed by. She was like a boil of Sunnydale, burst on the skin of L.A. It was all too much. Without a thought in her head of what would happen five minutes or even one minute later (for the girl or for herself) Buffy turned and fled as if in a fugue state. She didn't get far.
WHAM! For a moment Buffy literally didn't know what hit her. She was keenly aware that she was lying in the street with a crowd threatening to gather around her by the time that she determined, by logic more than memory, that what had hit her must have been a car. Buffy shot to her feet, ready to run and keep running. But this time she literally didn't make it one step. She was rooted to the spot, struck by what felt like the mother of all mistral cramps, plus a bonus shooting pain in her back. The pain was literally crippling. Buffy could barely manage to stay on her feet; taking a step was out of the question.
“Lily, call an ambulance,” Doyle instructed his erstwhile target, firmly and trying-to-be-calmly. “She's going into labor.” Buffy tried to look around to see who the demon was referring to. She'd have liked to have done something to help the poor woman, if only this horrible pain would let up. Then suddenly, unaccountably it did. Or, okay, maybe not so unaccountably, because there was a notable lack of other women crippled by massive but inconstant abdominal pain in the immediate vicinity. And it was even now becoming clear that she had not so much 'manage to stay on her feet' as been held up by Dolye.
“Oh Crap!” Buffy groaned. Like her life didn't suck enough. “Giles...” she mumbled aloud, but finished the thought only in her head, 'I am so gonna kick your ass.'