The air smelled of bougainvillea, and a warm, salty breeze touched his face. He was walking through a jungle--no, not a jungle so much as a garden of fig trees and palms. Long thin fronds brushed softly against his skin as he passed them by. He'd the most wonderful sense of anticipation, far beyond that of any birthday or Christmas he'd ever known, even as a boy. Warm sunlight touched him, and spilled irregularly-shaped coins of gold over the ground at his feet.

Giles lifted a branch, took a step, and found himself in the quasi-Mediterranean courtyard normally reached down the back steps from his flat. Although, from the shadows, it must have been afternoon, the brighter light made him squint, and blink several times before his eyes adjusted. It came to him that the fountain--usually silent due to one drought or another--was playing, and that someone awaited him.

His breath caught: her hair glowed, molten gold, and the sun silhouetted her body through her thin cotton frock--the gentle curves of back and waist, her lovely legs. She turned, as if sensing his presence, and that incandescent smile lit up her face. Only his Buffy could stir him so, both body and soul.

"Giles!" she said, in obvious delight. "Where did you come from? I didn't know--"

He crossed the courtyard in three steps, and stopped her mouth with a kiss, his tongue delving into those sweet mysterious depths. She tasted of sunlight and honey, an almost-overwhelming headiness. He could not help but touch her. His hands roamed over her lovely warm skin, like satin beneath his fingers. Further exploration revealed that she wore nothing beneath the dress, not even the flimsy lingerie she usually favored. He drew his lips down her throat, over her tanned, bare chest, bent his head to her, suckling one breast through the cotton, feeling the nipple rise and pucker beneath his lips and tongue.

"Buffy," he breathed against her, "Buffy, my beloved, my goddess, my joy."

She panted, her hips pushing toward his chest, and Giles cupped her buttocks in his hands, savouring their slight, firm roundness even as he savoured the taste of her skin.

Buffy slid back onto the mouth of the fountain. Her thighs parted, and he ran his hands--his two good hands--up and down their length, loving their strength and their softness. Slowly, tenderly, Giles kissed down her stomach. Her back arched and his tongue found her navel, dipping shallowly into that covered hollow. He pushed back the fabric of her skirt, blowing lightly into the downy curls, the golden treasure that hid her sex from him.

His hands made their way behind her again, cradling, lifting, tilting her to that angle at which he could best make further discovery. She balanced perfectly and, as he touched her with his tongue, drawing it lightly over those lovely folds, Giles felt her shudder with pleasure.

He ached with desire. For her, only for her. Everything in his life for her.

He ached, and warmth and the sunlight were fading. The courtyard no longer existed. He held nothing, nothing, in his hands.

He ached...and Buffy was gone from him. Gone as if she'd never been, and with her the glow of summer, the overwhelming joy, the anticipation.

He lay in another place entirely, chilly, and in desperate pain. Every nerve of his body burned.

"Rupert," said a quiet, Scottish voice. "Rupert, can you hear me?"

After much effort, Giles managed to open his lids sufficiently enough to allow a sliver of vision. His eyes stung terribly. Even the dim light of the quiet space where he lay too seemed too much for much for him to bear. The gentle touch of a hand on his brow brought him agony, as did the pressure of his clothing against his skin.

Why had Buffy been taken from him? He wanted her even more than he wanted the pain to end. She would make everything bearable--and not merely bearable. Certain and safe and filled, once more, with golden light. She'd make him complete again.

He tried to call out her name, but nothing emerged.

A face bent over his, its sapphire eyes half-obscured by a forelock of golden hair. Giles put an even greater effort into his attempts to speak. He knew he must speak, if only to convince himself that he could not be seeing what he knew he was seeing. That it could not mean what he knew it must mean.

"I know it's terribly painful," the Scottish voice said.

Buffy, Giles thought, in utter misery. Oh, God, Buffy. Was one really meant to feel this way, after...? After...

After one died. That could be the only meaning. He'd no doubt the golden-haired Scottish boy leaning over him was Randall, and since Randall was, without question, dead, then...

Then they had been reunited in the place Ran had gone too--and, heaven or hell, Giles had no wish to be there.

Furthermore, he wondered, where were the welcoming lights, the joyous reunions?

Unless, as he'd been taught as a boy, there was, truly, a hell separate from that place of magic and deception into which he, with Ripper, had previously fallen. One somehow expected, at the very least, a ceremonious banishment to the netherworld. How could one be expected to experience eternities of such physical and spiritual anguish, and not even be told the reason?

Sebastian had said to him, once, that Hell was the absence of hope. In hopelessness, he at last found his ability to speak, crying out the name of his beloved.

"What's wrong with him?" a second, lightly-accented voice asked.

"Ssh," the Scottish one answered. "He's only a bit confused right now, Ishmael."

"And calling out to the Slayer? Wonder what he thinks we are?" A smooth, handsome face, with skin of dark golden-brown, hove into view.

"It's an exceedingly painful poison--he quite likely imagines we're the foulest fiends of hell." Footsteps withdrew. "Go rally the others," the Scottish voice continued. "I know that I needn't warn you to be discrete."

"No worries," answered the second man, in as nonchalant a tone as Giles ever heard. Somewhere, a door opened and closed, its hinges creaking irritatingly.

There were doors in Hell, then? Giles had long since begun to doubt his first impression, though his confusion remained.

The face returned, its large, luminous eyes gazing down upon him. Giles struggled and struggled, and at last found his voice again. "Randall...?"

The young man smiled slightly. "No, it's Simon, actually. Simon Quartermass. At your service." Again, he touched Giles's forehead, then felt for the pulse in his throat. "Honestly, Mr. Giles, there's no need to agitate yourself." A dreadful, scraping noise followed, as the young man dragged a chair closer to the bed. "I've given you the first injection of the antidote, but I imagine you're still feeling bloody."

"Wha...? Who?" The confusion ebbed and flowed. Quartermass was a Watcher name--the Watcher Diary Willow pilfered from his files at Halloween two years previously had been written by a man who very likely was young Simon's ancestor.

"I'd just come into the carpark when you and Her Ladyship entered the Compound," Quartermass informed him. "The Seniors never knew I was there. Ishmael and I followed and hid you."

"We're in...inside the Compound." Giles struggled to lift his head from the pillow, but was awarded by an alarming wave of giddiness.

Quartermass restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. "Are you thirsty?" he asked. "Do you think that you might manage a bit of water?"

"I..." Giles shut his eyes, unable to attempt even another word. A straw slipped between his lips. He sipped, weakly, a bit of the cool liquid, then a little more. The effort drained him.

Small callused hands pushed back his sleeve. He felt the cool sting of alcohol, and then the prick of a needle. It made him think again of Buffy, this memory not so pleasant. It put him in mind of her eighteenth birthday.

"I thought I was dead," he told the young man who sounded so much like Randall. "And you were...someone else."

"There, now, you're already sounding better." The hand returned to his brow. "Rest a little, Mr. Giles. You'll soon be feeling well. You certainly are far from dead--that was never the intent of the poison."

"Poison...?"

"Rest," Quartermass insisted. The lights dimmed. "There's time enough for questions once you've recovered.

Buffy kicked a tire--she had to do something, and pounding Sebastian's head a hundred times against the roadside gravel probably wasn't going to help. At least he had the decency to look apologetic, for all the good that did.

"I might remind you," Seb said plaintively, "That this isn't my car, and I'm not best acquainted with what it contained--or didn't."

"It's the didn't that ticks me off," Buffy told him, kicking the good tire again. It gave a small pathetic hiss, and slowly began to deflate.

"Bloody Hell," Sebastian said, and sat on the bumper with his head in his hands.

"I guess we've reached the point of moot by this time." Buffy took a seat beside him, scowling at oncoming traffic. "Maybe I kicked it too hard."

Sebastian muttered something she couldn't catch, even with Slayer hearing.

"I'm sorry. I didn't hear you."

"I said it might have been better not to kick it at all."

Buffy glared at him, and Sebastian glared back. Damn, if he didn't have those Giles-glares down nearly as well as his dad!

"One flat or four, we still don't have a jack to lift up the car, so we can't fix it. Them. Whatever."

"Do you ever bloody listen to yourself?" Sebastian's glare reached into the realm of ultra-high wattage. "If what you experienced was, in fact, a premonition, Buffy, then my father, whom you profess to love so well, might be in extremely grave danger."

"I hate it when you do that." Buffy didn't glare--she wasn't in his league, and knew when to admit defeat.

"Do what, precisely?" Seb snapped. Only a Brit-guy of the Giles variety could have managed to work the word "precisely" into his snappage.

"Talk with a bunch of commas. It sounds snide. And it makes me feel dumb."

Slowly, as Sebastian looked at her, the glare faded, until he just seemed tired, worried, and Gilesey. "You aren't dumb, Buffy," he told her, in a quiet voice.

"I'm sorry," he added a little later. "If I sounded patronizing. It was the frustration, and I wasn't right to vent that on you."

"Me too," Buffy told him. "Being frustration-girl--as in, I shouldn't have. Been. To you." She took a deep breath, trying to get her sentences lined up again so that they actually made sense. "I was edging close to the Cordelia-zone, which wasn't fair to you. It's just--" Buffy found herself staring at the toes of Sebastian's shoes--they were nice shoes, stylish without being gaudy. She was beginning to suspect Celeste bought all Seb's clothes, and wondered if Giles would let her get away with doing that for him.

Probably not. Not a chance in hell, really.

"It's just that I miss him," she concluded, so quietly she wondered if Seb would even be able to hear. "Even last summer, when I ran away, I'd think. 'I want to call Willow. I want to call Xander. I want to call mom.' But what I'd find myself doing was standing by the payphone with my fingers on the buttons, and every time the number I'd almost finished punching in would be Giles's. I knew, if I ever really, really couldn't stand it anymore, I could call him, and he wouldn't ask any questions, he'd just come for me."

"Why didn't you call?" Sebastian asked.

"Because I knew..." The wind had pushed threads of hair across her face, and Buffy brushed them back again. "I knew I didn't deserve him," she whispered.

Sebastian reached out and squeezed her hand. "I believe you do, Buffy," he answered, sounding as if he actually meant it. "That is, now you do. If I might paraphrase--" He gave a little smile. "When one is a child, one thinks and speaks and acts as a child, but when one grows to adulthood, one puts away childish things. You've put away all but the last vestiges of your childhood, Buffy--and when we are adults, we tend to care for those we love to an even greater extent than we care for ourselves. You've certainly demonstrated that quality."

"We'll find him, won't we?" Buffy wished that she could lose the scared feeling in the pit of her stomach, and just be confident, cool, Slayer-Buffy--for Giles, and for herself. "It's just that now...I miss him every single second we're apart. And it's different from Angel. Really, really different."

Sebastian just looked at her, with that kind, sympathetic Giles-look in his eyes, until she almost wished he'd stop.

"I know, I know," she said. "Only, do you think we could get those new and improved lives? The ones that come with the guarantees?"

Seb gave one of those dry little laughs. "I'm with you there, my dear--if only we could!"

After an indefinite, dreamless period of time, during which he slept like one truly dead, Giles woke to find himself alone. Thin grey sunlight dribbled into the room, and he lay upon a bed of penitential firmness. To say he felt well would have been a gross overstatement. Rather, he experienced something like the aftermath of a bad flu, or the midst of an alarming hangover--which nonetheless, compared to his earlier agony, seemed entirely tolerable.

Slowly, groaning, he raised his body from the hard mattress and swung his legs over the edge. A thin carpet barely warmed the floor beneath his feet, and the entire room swung around him as if he was sailing in a smallish ship on high seas. The cheerless stone walls and the Spartan furnishings indicated that he had, indeed, been hidden inside someone's rooms at the Watchers' Compound.

"Bloody hell," he muttered, leaning his face into his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He could have drunk an entire barrel of water and still felt thirsty. The achiness, thirst, and sense of unbalance were, in fact--from his training sessions with Buffy, battles with the powers of darkness, and numerous head injuries--feelings to which he was perfectly accustomed. He'd no intention of succumbing to them at this stage of his career.

The room's owner had left a carafe of water on the nightstand. Giles poured out a glass and tossed it off, feeling his stomach lurch and then subside. Business as usual, ready for action. He drank a second glass.

The door opened and shut almost soundlessly as Quartermass, his rescuer, entered, stopping just inside the door and leaning back against the panels. The young man possessed a resemblance to Randall that was truly astounding, though perhaps not as marked as, in his state of muddledness, Giles had first imagined. Yes, he'd the golden hair and sapphire eyes--but those eyes held a certain wariness beneath their expression of innocence, and the first faint etchings of what might, someday, become laugh lines surrounded them. Simon wasn't a boy, as Giles first thought--he was, rather, perhaps close to Sebastian's age.

"I'd ask if you were feeling better," Quartermass told him, in a soft, cultured voice that now revealed only the slightest traces of his Highlands origin. "But I can see that you are--and aren't." A faint smile hovered over his lips. "You're quite fortunate that I decided to do my Special Subject in poisons and antidotes, Mr. Giles."

Giles gave his own slight smile in return, acknowledging the truth of that statement. "I've no doubt that I'm extremely lucky. However did you smuggle me inside? If these are your rooms, you're taking rather an enormous chance, Quartermass."

"Yes, they're my rooms." The young man drew a chair away from his desk, sitting back to front, with his arms crossed over the edge of the backrest, his expression both confident and mildly troubled. "As for the difficulties that might follow...one way or another, it will soon be ended."

Giles regarded him until Quartermass gave a faint, flickering grin.

"I'm a known associate of Her Ladyship," he said. "If we come up on top in the scrummage, all's well and good. Should we be less fortunate, then, well..." He shrugged.

"Ishmael helped me to bring you up here," Quartermass continued. "The Compound's not nearly so invulnerable as our superiors would have us believe--there are sewers and pipes galore underneath the grounds--even one of those great, arched Victorian monstrosities nearly the size of an Underground tunnel. One climbs a short ladder and wriggles through a hatchway directly inside our Buttery pantry--bit of a tight squeeze for a man your size, but otherwise dead easy."

"And quite useful when one's been gated." Giles stared at Quartermass with amazement. How had the young man learned of such things? In all his years, he'd never heard so much as an inkling, and yet the junior Watcher and his friends seemed to use the tunnels as if they were the bloody M5. Good Lord.

Quartermass's smile grew. "Yes, entirely useful. After all, sacred duty is one thing, Mr. Giles, but a man likes to have a bit of fun." He fetched Giles's shirt and waistcoat from a hanger and passed it to him.

"What has this generation of Watchers come too?" Giles answered, feeling himself actually grinning. He stretched, his spine giving off a series of audible pops, then slid his arms into the sleeves, left then right. The buttons gave him a bit of trouble--he'd still some difficulty focusing his sight, but he'd be damned before he asked for help, even from so pleasant a fellow as young Quartermass.

"We've been waiting for you," Simon told him.

"Have you?" Giles asked. "And why is that?"

"Why, Mr. Giles--" The great blue eyes widened. "We want you to lead us to victory."