- **
The problem with haircuts was that no matter how careful the stylist, little irritating bits of hair managed to work their way under your shirt. Buffy stared at her hair with regret while she ran the bath. She'd never be able to recreate the just-styled look. Not that anyone had noticed the difference.
She brushed off as much of the hair as she could before turning on the jets and slipping into the water. At least Wesley's townhouse was pretty nice. Cushy, even. Her last apartment hadn't even had a tub. Closing her eyes, she ducked her head beneath the surface, holding her breath for a three counts of ten before surfacing.
As she dried off, her eyes caught hold of something pale and pink shoved into a corner of the room; it looked suspiciously like her bra. Undressing was another thing she didn't remember doing. She sighed and collected it, her nose wrinkling at the scent of cigarette smoke that clung to the thing; hopefully, smoking wasn't one of the various vices she'd decided to experiment with during Buffy's Night Out.
She dressed quickly, pulling on t-shirt and a pair of sweats, and tried to decide what to do for the rest of the day. A few experimental stretches told her she wasn't quite ready to work out, and she'd had her fill of crowds for the day. She called her dad's number, leaving him a short message. Buffy didn't bother to leave a number. He hadn't even called back when Dawn died.
At loose ends, she wandered into the living room. She stood for a long time looking at the stack of books and notes on the coffee table. Technically, it was snooping, but if it was about her, it couldn't be too wrong. Well, it could, but she pushed that thought aside and started reading.
The arcane spell books in languages she couldn't even identify went to the floor as she spread out the various papers and piled the readable books in order of interest. Wesley's handwriting was a cramped mess, and his papers were filled with crossed-out lines and notes about notes. They were almost as unreadable as the spell books. Her head still hurt enough that she wasn't up to deciphering them, so she re-stacked them and opened the first book in her stack. Giles's diary, Vol. #1.
It wasn't anything she didn't already know. After all, she'd lived through everything he'd documented, so it was kind of like looking through a really embarrassing baby book. Even some of the earliest pages included mention of her sister. Pretty thorough monks.
She and Giles hadn't quite healed the breach between them before his death. Another one like Faith, stuck forever in what-if. Buffy flexed a hand, watching the tendons in her wrist move as she squeezed her fingers. Her muscles still looked the same, even if they didn't have the strength to take out anything more than a mid-sized human mugger. They wouldn't even have that if she hadn't kept training like her life depended on it, which it had.
Giles would be proud of her discipline.
The books contained no answers, just memories. She learned about the summer after her death, how Giles and Anya had somehow managed to order a coffin claiming it was for the Magic Box's Halloween display, and how Xander had come up with a headstone from out of town. Willow rebuilt the 'bot while Tara watched over Dawn and Buffy's body lay hidden in Spike's crypt, wrapped in plastic and surrounded by dry ice until they were able to bury her at the edge of the cemetery. Apparently, she had looked "serenely beautiful" in death, at least according to Giles. Well, that was something at least. She would have guessed she just looked dead.
Post-resurrection, the entries grew increasingly sporadic. A few pages where he worried about her recovery, more than a few about his need to let her fight her own battles, an embarrassing entry from right before Giles took Willow back to England, focusing on the Spike situation and Giles's second thoughts about the wisdom of having left her alone and vulnerable.
The rest of the last volume was all about the potential Slayers and the First. Several months before the final battle, there was an entry about visiting something called Beljoxa's Eye and learning about the instability in the Slayer line. No wonder he hadn't looked surprised when Wesley had shown up in Sunnydale shortly after Faith, possible solution in hand. The entries where he agonized about possibly having to kill her to fix things explained both how weirdly he'd acted those last few months and his insistence that she go along with Wesley's plan.
She wondered if Wesley had read it yet. If he hadn't tried to save Faith from having to kill her, Giles would have done the deed, the mystical juju surrounding the Slayer would have mended, and Faith would have been fine. No gory death, no additional weight on her conscience. She looked at his notes. Nothing beyond the second-to-last volume, the one with all the burial and resurrection details. Good. Bad enough that she knew. Carefully, she put everything else back the way it had been, and took the last volume up to her room, stuffing it under the mattress until she could figure out what to do with it.