I'm still trying to get a grip on Ms. Morgan. Leave it to Faith not to have a problem.

KAY

I went to the online phone book and located the “Camarillo Factory Outlets”, forty minutes away.Sounded like the place, if these visions had a service area. “He looks like Chewbacca on steroids,” Cordy said.

“Sounds like a Krevloch demon. “ Wesley said. “Let me consult my books and see what I can find out.”

“No offense, Wes, but I think we’d just better be going. We’ve got a forty-minute drive already, huh? And he’s gonna stick out. Just a little, don’t you think?”

“But you know very little about it...its vulnerabilities and so on. How will you manage?"

“We’ll wing it. I’ll be in touch in forty minutes, huh?”

“Not the way I drive,” Gunn said.

“A man after my own heart,” I said, and noticed Wesley frowning. “It’s okay, babe. You look after Cordelia and if I need anything out of the Dungeons and Dragons playbook, you’re my guy.”

“I still think ‘winging it’ is incredibly ill-advised. Don’t come running to me if you get killed. What? I don’t even know what I’m saying any more.”

”That makes two of us, hon. Look, though, besides my ordinary Earth weapon, Mr. Smith and Wesson, I’ve got four stakes and this sharp axe-thing you gave me. Just when I couldn’t get any cuddlier, huh? Check me out...Xena the Warrior Flatfoot. But I’m not gonna start dressing like her, though.” I showed off my full gunbelt.

”Too bad,” Gunn teased. “That’d make it real easy to come to work."

“I think life might be hard on a blind demonfighter, Gunn.”.

Deena, i really liked that scrap -- i enjoy the way you write Faith.

Oh, very nice, Deena. (I got your email, by the way, I've simply been in no position to reply yet. Still working on playing catchup. Are you around, perchance?)

In and out -- just got back from the grocery store and have to cook dinner in a bit.

t tip-toes in

I know I haven't been around much, but I thought I'd show you this little thing I wrote. It was for the Gilesficathon, and I got the horrid pairing of Giles/Buffy, but I tried to work around it.

Better-known

There was a time, once, when Buffy remembers not needing him. She knows in her bones that there was a time before him, a time when she was just Buffy, without ritual or importance, but in all honesty she cannot recall it.

What she is has molded her into what she became, but it he who shaped the course of her destiny, made her the woman she is today with care and patient countenance, and she cannot conceive of a time when he did not speak her name and she came quickly to his side.

It was chance that brought them together, or perhaps fate. Their relationship has been tested, more than once, a thousand times over, in calamity after calamity and pain, heartbreak, but their mettle is strong and their will even stronger.

At the end of the day, there is only one truth she adheres to: she is Slayer, and he Watcher, and that is the definition of her world.

She is older now, older than she expected to be given the circumstances, and has trained more young Slayers in the nature of her Watcher than she could easily remember. The names and faces blur before her eyes, and she, in retrospect, becomes ever more grateful for the focused attention of one person upon her she once had. These girls, instead, are hurried through training to meet the sheer volume of them, and the demand for them in the field.

She hopes they don't feel neglected or uncared-for. She never expected to be Watcher-like at all, pursuing her destiny with a single-minded drive that surpassed concern for most others. It never occurred to her to pay attention to the focus Giles was directing towards her, taking it for granted as something that would always be. Now she hopes she can pass on some of that intensity to her Slayers, make them understand the world as she knows it through him so that they might be prepared to take it on, in all its dark glory.

Even now she wishes to have him by her side, though she does not venture in the field as often as she might, preferring instead to let the untried test their ability, much as she once did. There are other things that hold her concern now, her family and small cares, things that were forever put aside due to the nature of her calling. But things have been upturned now, and they are still feeling out the exact nature of the new order of the world they fight in.

It is a bright new day when she steps out onto the field where the first of many practice sessions will be held that day. She sees him sipping his cup of coffee, feet slipped into soft sandals and his greying hair framed gold in the breaking sunlight. She smiles to herself, and pauses a moment before disturbing his thoughts to hand him the biscuit she brought from the kitchen. He catches her eye and smiles back, full and serene in the starting day, and pulls her close to him. It is days like this when she knows she needs no more than she has, because he is forever her Watcher, and she his Slayer, and that is the definition of her world.

SA, that was very nice. See, the Buffy/Giles doesn't bite. I'm rather fond of a several bits of it.

That is nice, SA, and I don't like Buffy/Giles either.

Oh, SA, how lovely. Way to work around the Evil Pairing, and make it right!

I'm hoping it works because it's not explicitly B/G, simply an acknowledgment of their relationship in its proper form whatever way the reader interprets it.

The requirement t shudder was "hot sex," which I blatantly ignored because there was no way on this earth I could have written it.