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At almost midnight, the Sunnydale High corridors had gone the way of all schools: dead quiet. Jenny Calendar walked softly toward the library, two paper cups of coffee warming her hands. Three hours of Latvian translation had left her frayed at the edges. She almost hadn't come. She had stood in the parking lot for a full minute, telling herself it was the cold making her shiver, before admitting that she was nervous. That was the thing about Rupert Giles: he made her nervous in a way she couldn't quite remember experiencing before. Ever since she'd asked him out, rose in hand, he'd been pulling away in that polite, devastating way of his, and she still hadn't figured out how to entice him closer.
She paused at the frosted glass of the swinging double doors that opened to the library. Through the distortion she could make out the familiar shape of his shoulders. She nudged one door open an inch, already composing her entrance—the easy smile, the coffee as a peace offering—and then stopped.
Inside, illuminated by the warm, brassy glow of the desk lamp, Buffy was sitting on the edge of the large oak table. She looked small, exhausted, and battered. A nasty gash painted the side of her forehead. Giles stood in front of her, entirely abandoning the usual distance he kept from his Slayer. He was gently dabbing the wound with a cotton ball and antiseptic, his face etched with a profound, aching worry.
"Ow," Buffy hissed, jerking her head away from the antiseptic-soaked cotton with a wince that travelled down her entire body. Giles’s hands hovered, uncertain, for a moment; then he pressed the pad more gently to the torn skin, whispering a rote apology. She kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling, and she clenched her fists in her lap to keep from flinching again.
“This is the third time this week, you know,” Giles murmured, the words measured but betraying a tremor at the edges. He tried to sound exasperated, but in the lamplight his worry was so naked that for once Buffy felt sorry for him. He tossed the bloodied cotton ball away, missing the wastebasket, and reached for a fresh one.
Buffy tried a joke, but it caught in her throat and came out a croak. “Slaying is a tough gig. We don’t get dental, you know. Or hazard pay.”
Giles smiled, a thin, crooked line that never quite reached his eyes. “If you would learn to duck, Buffy, we wouldn’t have to perform this little ritual,” he said. His voice was gentle, almost a lullaby, but Buffy caught the note of real anxiety beneath the teasing. He studied the cut for a moment, then brushed a strand of blood-matted hair from her face with such care that her breath hitched. The gesture wasn’t paternal, exactly, nor was it driven by worry. It was something else—something deeper and harder to name.
“Is it bad?” she asked, tilting her head so he could see the wound better.
Giles shook his head, but his lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval. “It’s not good,” he said, and the way he said it made Buffy feel like she’d disappointed him, which hurt more than the alcohol stinging her forehead. “You’ll heal. But you mustn’t take unnecessary risks, however formidable you believe yourself to be.”
His hands, always so precise, retrieved a butterfly bandage from the first aid kit and carefully affixed it to her skin. For a few seconds, the only sound in the library was the hum of the ancient air conditioner and the rustle of Giles’s tweed as he leaned over her.
Buffy let herself slump forward, her exhaustion overwhelming her usual composure. She rested her forehead against the scratchy fabric of his jacket and closed her eyes. Giles stiffened, every muscle in his body going rigid in surprise, but after a moment his hand hovered over her back, then settled cautiously between her shoulder blades. He patted her twice, awkwardly, as if unsure of the protocol.
“I’m okay,” she said, but the words were muffled against his chest, and she didn’t sound okay at all.
Giles’s throat worked as he swallowed. “Perhaps you’ll let me be the judge of that,” he replied, softer than before. He didn’t let go.
They stayed like that, frozen in a tableau more intimate than either expected. Buffy was the first to break away. She straightened, not looking at him, and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. “Thanks for patching me up,” she muttered. “Again. Honestly, I’d probably bleed out in a ditch if it weren’t for you.”
“Don’t say such things,” Giles said, his voice tightening with emotion. He squeezed her shoulder gently. “I am sworn to protect you, Buffy. In all things. You are... well. You are my first priority. Always.”
Outside the doors, Jenny stepped back as if she had been physically struck. My first priority. Always. She looked down at the two coffees in her hands, suddenly feeling incredibly foolish. They weren't just a Watcher and a Slayer. They were an impenetrable unit. A untouchable duo forged in blood, leaving absolutely no room for a techno-pagan who was just passing through. She was a temporary distraction; Buffy was his life.
Jenny stood there a moment longer than she should have. She looked back at the frosted glass, then at the coffees again. She walked to the nearest trash can and stood over it. She put one cup in. She stood there holding the other one. It made no sense to drink coffee this late at night anyway; she disposed of the second cup too. She walked toward the computer lab, did not look back at the library doors, and did not slow down.
The glow of the computer monitor illuminated the fresh tear tracks on Jenny’s face. On the screen was a digitized translation of an ancient Romani text, but her mind was fixed on the image from the library, Buffy wrapped in Giles’ arms; protected, safe, loved.
She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the Orb of Thesulah. It felt heavy, warm with latent, ancient magic. Her clan had sent her here to ensure the vampire who slaughtered their people suffered for eternity. But the orb knew her, and every hidden wound well enough to latch on. Watching Buffy and Giles had twisted her mandate from simple jealousy into something deeper, something far more barbaric amplified by the magic of the Orb.
She sat in the blue glow of the computer lab. Her chair was set at a right angle to the desk, as if she couldn't bear to face the screen head-on, and her hands hovered over the keyboard, fingers curled in shapes that might have been the beginning of a spell or a defence against it.
She hated herself for caring. She hated the curve of his voice around Buffy’s name, the way his eyes went distant and soft when he spoke of prophecies and monsters and duty. She hated that part of her still wanted to shake him, to scream at him that she was here, a grown woman, not some footnote in the Watcher's diary. But most of all, she hated the sick, electric urge to hurt him just enough so he would remember she existed.
Jenny took the Orb in both hands and rolled it across her palms. It pulsed with the heartbeat of her ancestors; its magic was old, angry, and relentless, a reflection of self. She brought the incantation up on the screen again, the Romani letters stark and jagged in the sterile font. "Te implor, Doamne, nu-i ierta..." she whispered. The syllables stung her tongue, the language of her childhood weaponized.
The candle beside her flickered low. The air in the room thickened and crackled, gathering itself around her shoulders like a migraine. Jenny flicked a lit match into the metal wastebasket and let the flame gutter out. Her hands trembled, but she pressed on, chanting the words with more force now, as if sheer volume could fill the void inside her.
A pulse of heat radiated from the Orb. The computer screen glitched, lines of code fracturing and mending themselves in impossible fractals. Jenny watched as the translation on the monitor changed, the text shifting and reforming of its own accord, as if something was rewriting the spell from the inside out. Her vision doubled; she saw herself reflected in the glass, her face gaunt, eyes rimmed red. She wondered if Giles would even notice, if he would ever care enough to see the damage she was about to unleash.
She finished the incantation and waited. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the light candle surged and snuffed out, plunging the room into shadow. The Orb of Thesulah blazed in her lap, a miniature sun, and all at once Jenny was not alone. She felt the presence enter her from the base of her spine, crawling and cold and furious. It knew her—knew every hidden wound, every simmering grudge.
Jenny smiled, sharp and wet-eyed. She thought of Buffy, that perfect girl with her perfect face, and she thought of Giles, so unbreakable in his duty, and she thought of the world, so fragile in its order. She was going to ruin everything. But first, she was going to make him see her, even if it meant tearing herself apart in the process.
The magic snapped off with a sound like a bone breaking. Jenny gasped, clutching the Orb to her chest. Her reflection in the darkened monitor looked haunted, but she soon smiled, steady and savage. She set the Orb on the desk and exhaled, a shuddering laugh escaping her lips.
The night in Sunnydale was thick and breathless, an oily darkness that seemed to seep through the seams of windowpanes and under doors, settling in the lungs and making every breath heavy. In his apartment, Angel paced restlessly, muscles taut, body humming with an agitation he could not name. The bruised velvet curtains were drawn tight against the world outside, but still, the pull of the night beyond was insistent—a summons he could not ignore, a pulse that set his teeth on edge and made the hairs on his arms stand.
He was halfway through the living room when it hit, a deep, splitting agony that drove him to his knees. The pain was nothing like before, nothing like the slow ache of guilt he had grown used to living with, nothing like the subtle, constant gnaw of regret. This was a raw, unspeakable violence: a sensation like every nerve in his body being plucked and rewired, a hands-and-knees convulsion that locked his spine in a spasm of pure, unfiltered pain. For a moment, Angel's mind was a white-hot void. Light exploded behind his eyes, and in the vortex of agony something slipped—something ancient, predatory, and cold as the grave.
It was over as suddenly as it had begun. Angel collapsed forward, cheek pressed to the tile, clutching the floor as if it might stop him from floating away. He waited, panting, close to retching, for the familiar ache of conscience, the tide of remorse that always followed even the smallest slip. Instead, there was only silence inside him. Sweet, clean silence. He rolled onto his back and lay there, staring at the ceiling fan as it circled lazily overhead, hypnotic in its slow, deliberate rotations.
His tongue felt foreign in his mouth, his hands at once both his and not his. He sat up, letting the change settle into his joints, his bones, his blood. For the first time in a hundred years, the weight of his soul was gone—not just muffled or dulled by distraction, but utterly erased, as if it had never existed. The void left in its wake was not emptiness, but a kind of clarity, a razor-sharp hunger that lit up every cell in his body with purpose.
It took only a moment to get to his feet. He moved with new confidence, the predatory grace that once defined him returning as if it had never left. He looked around the apartment with a sneer; everything was so neat, so carefully arranged, so pathetic. The art on the walls was sentimental, the books lined up in alphabetical order. It was the living space of a man who tried to believe he could be human, who thought he could atone through taste and self-deprivation. Angelus laughed, deep and black and feral, and the sound startled even him in its violence. He grinned. It felt good to grin, to bare his teeth without shame or apology.
He wanted to kill something, but there was a more pressing urge: to hunt. To show the world that the most dangerous thing it ever tried to put in a cage had broken free. He slipped out into the night, moving through Sunnydale’s empty streets with predatory ease, scenting the air for the one thing he craved above all others.
It was almost too easy to find her. She was walking home, alone, every step shouting exhaustion and denial. Buffy’s head was bowed, her hands jammed deep in her jacket pockets, the cut on her forehead still oozing sluggishly beneath the makeshift bandage. She hadn't noticed him. She was too tired to notice anything.
He followed her for blocks, savouring the anticipation, letting her feel the eyes on the back of her neck without ever letting her catch him. When he finally closed the distance, it was almost tender: a hand on her shoulder, a whisper in her ear, the softest exhalation of her name. She turned, and for a split second her face opened with hope, the kind of hope that makes the world worth ruining.
He hit her so fast she barely had time to scream.
She fought—God, how she fought. Angelus had missed this, the violent dance of predator and prey, the way a Slayer’s body moved under his hands, all muscle and light and futile, beautiful struggle. She got a knee into his stomach and an elbow to his jaw, but he was stronger, so much stronger, and he overwhelmed her in seconds.
He dragged her through the alleys, through muck and the smell of rot, until they reached the warehouse he’d found abandoned years ago. He chained her carefully, reverently, making sure the iron bit into her wrists but not enough to break the skin—he wanted her alive, awake, aware.
Her struggle delighted him. And when he began to hit her with the back of his hand, the noises she made only excited him further. Just as she was about to pass out, he leaned in and pressed his mouth to her ear, letting the sweetness of her fear fill him up.
"See you soon, lover," he whispered, and then darkness took her.
Buffy woke to the smell of rust, damp earth, and copper. Her arms were stretched above her head, wrists bound by thick unmovable iron chains descending from the rafters. Her eyes began to focus through the darkness to the figure standing across from her.
"Sleeping Beauty awakens."
Angel stepped out of the shadows. But the way he walked—a predatory, theatrical saunter—sent a spike of ice through Buffy’s chest. His face shifted into its vampiric ridges, eyes gleaming yellow with malicious joy.
"Angel?" she rasped, pulling at the chains. "What happened? What's wrong with you? Where am I?"
"Oh, Buffy. Always so self-centred. Not everything is about you." Angelus picked up a rusted crowbar, trailing it lightly across her collarbone. "Though, I suppose you are the prize. You see, I was suddenly, wonderfully unburdened tonight. And I didn't even have to lift a finger."
He struck her, a brutal backhand that sent her vision spinning.
"I'd love to take the credit for breaking myself out of that soulful prison," Angelus whispered, his breath cold against her ear. "But your little computer teacher beat me to it. Turns out, Ms. Calendar was feeling a bit... left out. Giles pays too much attention to his Slayer."
Buffy’s heart hammered against her ribs. Jenny? Before she could process the betrayal, Angelus went to work. The torture wasn't just physical; it was deeply psychological. He spent hours breaking down every insecurity she had, carving into her soul, ensuring she knew that her Watchers love was the very thing that had doomed her to this fate.
High above them, standing on a rusted steel catwalk, Jenny watched. Her hands gripped the railing, her stomach twisting into sick knots. This wasn't what she wanted. She wanted Buffy humbled, not butchered. The reality of Angelus was far more horrific than her jealousy had allowed her to imagine. She supposed she really should have been careful what she wished for, but it was too late now, the lamp had already been rubbed, the genie free.
Then, the warehouse doors exploded. The roar of an engine drowned out Angelus’s laughter. Headlights tore through the gloom as Giles’s car—pushed well past its limits—smashed through the corrugated steel loading doors.
This wasn't the mild-mannered librarian. This wasn't the man who fussed over damaged book spines and polished his glasses when he was nervous. The man behind the wheel had his teeth bared, his knuckles bone-white on the steering wheel, and his foot flat to the floor. The engine screamed. Angelus hissed and leapt sideways with unnatural speed—just barely, just in time—as Giles drove the car straight into the load-bearing concrete pillar beyond, where it slammed violently.
"Buffy!" The word tore out of Giles like something animal. He was already moving before the hood had stopped crumpling, the battle-axe swinging up into both hands.
"Giles, look out!" Buffy screamed.
Angelus lunged from the darkness, but Giles swung the axe with feral precision, catching the vampire across the chest. It wasn't a killing blow, but it was enough to stagger him.
Above them, the structural integrity of the warehouse gave way. The pillar Giles had rammed was the primary support for the decaying roof and the catwalk network.
"Rupert!" Giles froze at the sound of Jenny’s voice. He looked up just in time to see the catwalk buckle.
"Jenny—no!"
A massive section of the ceiling collapsed inward. Steel beams and heavy roofing plummeted. Angelus, realising the tactical disadvantage, laughed a sharp, cruel bark. "Hate to eat and run!" he yelled, blurring into the shadows toward the rear exit just as the debris rained down.
Giles moved quickly, throwing himself over Buffy as best he could as she kneeled on the ground, shielding her body with his own as the building crashed around them.
Silence fell over the ruined warehouse, broken only by the hiss of the crushed car’s radiator.
Coughing through the thick cloud of plaster and dust, Giles frantically worked the axe against Buffy's restraints, his hands trembling. The moment they snapped, Buffy collapsed against his thighs as he stood in front of her, bruised, bleeding, and weeping. He quickly climbed down to her level, wrapping his arms around her, and held her tight, his tweed jacket soaking up her tears and blood. He moved back a little to look over her face, then pulled her in tightly again, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.
"I've got you," he whispered fiercely. "I've got you."
But as he looked over her shoulder, his blood ran cold. Protruding from beneath a massive pile of twisted steel and shattered concrete was a familiar hand, adorned with a familiar silver ring.
He let go of Buffy reluctantly and climbed up, stumbling toward the wreckage. He fell to his knees, his hands digging into the rubble, tearing his fingernails. When he had finally uncovered her, her body was still, lifeless, her eyes fixed open towards the hole in the roof.
Buffy crawled to his side, her battered hand reaching out to grip his shoulder.
He flinched and then reached for Jenny’s hand, feeling for a pulse and finding nothing. He removed his broken glasses, letting them fall to the floor, and put his head in his hand pressing his fingers hard against his eyelids, fighting the tears that stung his eyes.
The wail of a distant siren cut through the suffocating silence of the warehouse, a sharp, piercing reminder that the real world was still turning outside.
Giles stirred. The sound seemed to fracture the paralysis of his grief. He looked down at his hands, caked in plaster dust and streaked with blood, Buffy’s, Jenny’s, and his own. He closed his eyes, drawing in a ragged, shuddering breath, and when he opened them again, the raw, devastation was locked away behind a familiar, hardened mask. He was a Watcher, and his Slayer was bleeding. This was not the time for nostalgia.
"We have to move," he rasped, his voice sounding like cracked glass.
Buffy didn't respond. Her eyes were fixed on the body laying lifeless under the rubble, her expression utterly hollow. Giles shifted closer, wrapping his arm around her trembling shoulders, and gently but firmly forced her to look away.
"Buffy, look at me. Please." He waited until her glassy, bruised eyes met his. "Angelus is out there. The police will be here in minutes. We cannot be found here."
He helped her to her feet, taking the brunt of her weight as her knees buckled. She was shivering violently, the adrenaline crashing out of her system and leaving only the cold ache of shock and trauma. Giles stripped off his ruined tweed jacket and draped it over her shoulders, oblivious to the chill in the night air as the adrenaline coursed through him.
His car was a smoking, crushed husk wrapped around the concrete pillar. There would be no driving. Supporting her by the waist, Giles half-carried, half-dragged Buffy out through the shattered loading doors and into the night.
They didn't speak. The journey back to his home was a blur of staying to the shadows, avoiding the sweeps of passing headlights, and the agonizingly slow rhythm of Buffy’s limping gait. Every shadow looked like a vampire; every snap of a twig sounded like Angelus coming back to finish the job. But they met no resistance along their path.
When they finally reached Giles’s apartment, his hands shook so badly he dropped his keys twice before managing to unlock the door. He ushered her inside, slammed the door shut, and threw on the deadbolt. Keeping one hand on Buffy’s elbow he guided her to the edge of the sofa and helped her sit. "Sit, don't move. I'll be right back." he instructed softly.
The apartment was agonizingly normal. The lamps cast a soft, golden glow over his neatly arranged books and the dark wood of his furniture. It was a sharp contrast to the hell they had just crawled out of. He did a quick sweep of the windows, looking out before drawing the curtains closed. He then went into the bathroom to fetch supplies. When he returned from the bathroom, he carried a basin of warm water, a stack of clean towels, and his heavy-duty medical kit. He pulled the coffee table closer to the sofa, and sat facing her.
It was a grotesque, twisted mirror of the scene in the library just hours prior. But this time, there was no gentle teasing. No exasperated sighs about her failing to duck. There was only the grim, sickening reality of the wounds Angelus had left behind. The cuts were deliberate, cruel, and shallow—designed to inflict maximum pain without bleeding her out.
Giles soaked a washcloth in the warm water and wrung it out. "This will sting," he murmured, his voice completely stripped of its usual melodic cadence.
He began to clean the dried blood from her collarbone, his touch feather-light around the edges of her ripped vest, his jaw clenched tight enough to crack his teeth. Buffy sat perfectly still, staring blankly at his chest, letting him work. The water in the basin quickly turned a watered-down, rusted pink.
"He told me," Buffy whispered.
The words were so faint Giles almost didn't catch them. He paused, the bloody washcloth hovering over a nasty laceration on her shoulder. "What?" his eyes seemed to come into focus again as he looked at her.
Buffy finally looked up. Her eyes were brimming with a fresh, devastating wave of tears. "Angelus. He said... he said Jenny did it. She cursed him, she wanted to punish us."
Giles went perfectly still. The name felt like a physical blow to the ribs. "Buffy, he's a monster. He is designed to lie, to sow discord—"
"She was there, Giles," Buffy interrupted, her voice cracking. "She was watching, why would she be there if it weren’t true? He said she did it because..." A sob tore from her throat, raw and agonizing. She squeezed her eyes shut. "He said she did it because she was jealous. Of us. Because you pay too much attention to me."
The washcloth slipped from Giles’s fingers, landing in the pink water with a soft splash.
The silence in the apartment became deafening. Giles stared at her his ears ringing, the pieces of the night violently snapping into place. Jenny’s sudden appearance at the warehouse. The devastated, tear-stained look on her face just before the ceiling gave way. The words he had spoken in the library, standing far too close to his Slayer, oblivious to their audience.
You are my first priority. Always.
The realisation hit him with the force of a freight train, and he reached up to remove his glasses to try and blur the world around him. He hadn't just driven the car into the pillar that crushed her. He had laid the foundation for the entire catastrophe in the first place. He had let her think he was interested, hadn’t he? He’d been polite, courteous, maybe over friendly at times towards Jenny. Giles bowed his head, resting his elbows on his knees, and pressed the heels of his hands brutally into his eyes. A ragged, choking sound escaped his lips—a sound of absolute, fathomless self-loathing.
Buffy leaned forward, ignoring the screaming pain in her muscles, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She buried her face in his shoulder, gripping his shirt like a lifeline. Slowly, hesitantly, Giles brought his arms up and returned the embrace, burying his face in her blood-matted hair.
He was the one to pull away. For a long moment he sat with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed. When he finally looked up, his eyes were raw. "Buffy." He stopped. Started again. "What we have—what I have allowed to develop between us." He pressed his lips together, looking away toward the curtained window. "It cannot continue. It should never have been permitted to begin." His voice was barely above a whisper, each word chosen with the deliberate care of a man dismantling something he had built with his own hands.
Buffy said nothing. She didn’t have the strength or the words. The silence stretched out between them, filling the space with a heavy, electric charge. Giles sat hunched on the edge of the table, frozen. For a long, unmeasured moment, neither moved or breathed. She watched the muscles in his jaw clench and unclench, until at last he seemed to remember the glasses in his hand. He turned them over and over, a nervous tic that had once meant impatience or careful thought; now, it was just empty motion. Something to fill the void.
The glasses were ruined. The right lens was cracked straight across, bisecting the world into two jagged, unresolvable halves. He stared at the break, thumbed a fleck of blood off the bridge, and then set them down with precise care on the coffee table, right next to the basin of water stained with her blood and plaster dust. For a second, he studied them, as if hoping for some answer, some ancient wisdom to be revealed in the breakage. Nothing came.
Buffy’s hands curled into fists on her lap, knuckles whitening. The apartment was so quiet she could hear the distant rumble of police sirens, the tick of the kitchen clock, the faint hiss of the radiator. Giles looked up at her, then quickly away, his face a pale map of guilt and exhaustion.
He said, with a gentleness that was almost an apology, “We’re both at fault.” His voice was flat, almost unrecognisable, but it shook on the last word. He scrubbed his hands over his face, then pulled his knees close, retreating further into himself.
Buffy wanted to reach for him, to say something that would unwrite the nightmare. Instead, she just sat, trembling, the ghost of Jenny Calendar’s outstretched hand burned behind her eyelids.
The Slayer and her Watcher. It had always been enough—more than enough, it had been everything. But that was before. Now the words sat between them like the cracked lens on the coffee table, still recognizable, still technically whole, but split clean through the middle. She looked at Giles, really looked. The soft blood stains on his sleeve, the way his hair stuck up in tufts from running his hands through it, the streak of grey at his temples. The deep, hollowed-out pain of a man who had lost everything and was now responsible for holding up the other broken half.
Giles cleared his throat, trying to reassemble himself. He rested his forearms on his knees and leaned forward, speaking very softly as if afraid the walls might eavesdrop. “I should have protected you. Both of you.” He stopped, his throat working. “Instead I was—“ The word seemed to cost him something. “Selfish. I was selfish, and now you’re hurt, Angelus has returned to the streets, and Jenny is dead.”
The words knifed through her. For a second, she hated him for saying it, for taking all the blame, for trying to make himself her shield again. But the alternative—sitting with the full weight of what she felt for him, and what she had just watched them both bury—was something she could not yet do.
She exhaled, slow and shaky. “You did your best,” she said, the words so weak they barely counted as a lie.
Giles shook his head, once, violently. “No. I let myself believe that we could have a normal life, that I could… that any of this could be safe. That’s unforgivable.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her palms into her thighs, grounding herself in the pain. The only thing worse than the hurt was the thought of not feeling it at all.
He was staring at the water basin, eyes hollow. “Buffy, I—” He stopped, lost in the ruins of all the things he wanted to say. His hands trembled again, and he clenched them into fists to make it stop.
She reached across to him, her fingers brushing his. “We’re still here,” she said quietly.
That seemed to wake him. He looked up, searching her face for something—blame or forgiveness, she wasn’t sure. When Giles finally spoke, his voice was steadier, stripped of everything but the truth. “We have to be better. We have to be smarter. He won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Buffy nodded. She wouldn’t cry. Not now, not with him watching.
Giles rose stiffly from the sofa, rolling his battered sleeve and turning away to hide the depth of his grief. He busied himself with the towels, wringing them out, rinsing the bloody basin, doing anything to avoid looking at Buffy.
“I’ll make tea,” he said finally, his voice almost steady, as if it were any other night. He didn’t wait for her answer. He shuffled to the kitchen, leaving a trail of dirty towels and heartbreak in his wake.
The kettle whistled from the kitchen—a shrill, mundane sound that felt offensively normal against the heavy, suffocating silence of the apartment.
A few moments later, Giles returned. He carried two steaming mugs, his movements deliberate and slow, as if he were navigating a minefield. He set one mug on the table near Buffy’s uninjured hand and took his seat back on the edge of the coffee table. He didn't touch his own tea. Instead, his eyes fell to the heavy-duty medical kit, and he reached for it once again.
Buffy shifted slightly on the sofa, wincing. Her black yoga pants were caked with pale warehouse dust and plaster, a jarring sight against the pristine upholstery of his furniture, but aside from bruising her lower half remained unscathed.
"Right, then," Giles murmured, a hollow imitation of his brisk, British professionalism slipping back into place like a shield. "Let's finish this."
He pulled a sterile sleeve of butterfly closures from the kit. His hands were still trembling, but as he peeled the paper backing from the first tiny strip of tape, a practiced, Watcher's focus took over. He leaned in close, the comforting scent of Earl Grey mixing strangely with the sharp tang of antiseptic and copper.
With agonizing care, he pinched the edges of the deepest laceration near her collarbone together. Buffy drew in a sharp breath through her teeth, her knuckles turning white where she gripped the fabric of the sofa.
"Sorry," he breathed, pressing the butterfly stitch firmly across her skin to hold the torn edges shut. "Just a few more."
He worked in absolute silence, his eyes entirely focused on his hands, refusing to meet hers. He placed another stitch, and then another, meticulously sealing the cruel, shallow cuts Angelus had left behind. Every brush of his fingertips against her skin was painfully gentle, a physical apology for everything that had happened, and everything he couldn't bring himself to say.
Buffy watched his face—the tight clench of his jaw, the heavy, downward cast of his eyes—and let the hot, stinging pain anchor her to the present. When he finally smoothed the last butterfly stitch over the wound on her shoulder, he let his hand linger there, just for a fraction of a second, before pulling away entirely.
"Drink your tea," he said softly, finally looking up to meet her eyes. "Before it gets cold."