Here to Watch Girls, Chapter One: Clarification ( part 1 of about 15-20, first of 4 posts for today)

[protoneoromanic.livejournal.com]

Title: Here to Watch Girls

Author: ProtoNeoRomantic
Betas: Gilescandy & porkwithbones

Rating: NC-17 (work as a whole)

Paring: Giles/Willow, Giles/Buffy, Giles/Cordelia, Giles/other female characters

Word Count: 1415 (this chapter)

Chapter One: Clarification

Standing in the crowed hallway, peering from one of the large front windows of the school, watching the children, specifically the girls, being dropped off, searching each face in hopes of discovering one that was new, unfamiliar, destined to be important to him in the years to come, studying each new form because he couldn't not, Rupert Giles felt acutely self-conscious. He felt like an obvious pervert, a conspicuous voyeur. No one knows. The voice reminded him smugly. No one can see me, especially when I'm being good. To them you look like just another teacher on killjoy duty, watching to make sure they don't have fun. I'm going to kill you, you evil fucker! Giles thought very hard, his face becoming red with anger and embarrassment. I'm going to obliterate you and banish you to some really nasty bit of hell that even you won't be able to stand.

A few nearby teens, randomly struck by his laser-beam glare, stopped whatever they could think of that they might be doing wrong and hurried to class. Rupert would have liked nothing more than to have retreated to his dark, quiet, private office in his almost always mostly empty library. But he didn't dare revert to his original plan of waiting there for the Slayer to come to him, as was her destiny. Under the circumstances, he simply had to intercept her on more neutral, more public territory. You really think you can spoil my fun that easy? The unseen imp sneered. I could make your little problem a lot more obvious, even out here, and you know it. I know there is some way to be rid of you, Giles silently snarled in return. There has to be. I just have to find it. If thy right eye offend thee... Believe me, if it were truly a matter of right or left, I’d hardly hesitate. Ha! I wonder!

For a moment the creature was quiet and let Giles think. He was able to focus his full attention on the window once again. At last his eye picked out a delicious, moderately blonde little thing in a criminally short skirt bouncing out of a black SUV. He was certain he'd have remembered meeting her before, especially in the state he was in. That went double for the equally blonde, casually beautiful thirty-something woman dropping her off, who absolutely had to be her mother. Two simultaneous, yet mutually exclusive erotic fantasies gripped Rupert's imagination. This Miss Summers, whom he couldn't quite believe was actually called Buffy and not Elizabeth; the mother, whose name he didn't remember at the moment, other than Mrs. Summers. Limber young flesh, strong and powerful, curling possessively around him in an excess of violent passion; softer more vulnerable, still frankly pretty young flesh waiting welcomingly in his bed for his gentle caress. Suddenly, Giles felt himself getting more than reasonably angry again, wishing he could hide his face at least as well as his thick, multi-layered tweed suit hid his partial erection.

You could always help me open the Hellmouth and get MY body out, the demon reminded him for about the fiftieth time in three and a half weeks. Then I could make my own way in the world and leave you in peace. Fuck you. I'm getting MY body back, all to myself. She's going to help me, and you're not having her. Ah, a challenge. I love a challenge. Liar. You like shooting birds on the ground. If you'd had half a clue how well equipped I was to resist you, you'd have glommed onto someone else and taken him whole. Just my luck to pick a Marked man, the demon agreed resignedly. Still, it doesn't mean I can't enjoy a fight if I have to have one. It doesn't mean I won't best you and 'have' her more ways than one either, and you know it. Ah. Here she comes now. Of course, I could make you stand to attention and greet her properly, but out here that would only scare her off. That's one round to me then, finally. I wouldn't say that exactly.

The demon's last taunt had been thought with deep amusement. It didn't take Giles long to discover why. “Rupert?” said a shy, nervous little voice behind him as four delicate, tiny, hesitant fingertips brushed his shoulder, morally obligating him to turn from the window.

“Mi—I—Uh—Willow,” he stammered, with a bit too much surprise and too little warmth, ducking his head and smiling sheepishly, avoiding her huge, hurt puppy-dog eyes. “W-what, erm...” She goes to school here, you idiot. “... Can I help you with... Did you want something?”

“Just you,” Willow mumbled, then (eyes suddenly, impossibly widening) she joined in the stammering, “Oh! I... no! I didn't mean—I mean not that I d—not that I—Oh God, I just... We need to talk. I mean, you know, in private?” The poor girl blushed crimson, to the point that Giles could hardly help imaging how flushed and hot every inch of her skin must be under her absurdly childish plaid-pinafore-over-white-tights-and-Oxford-shirt ensemble. Bastard. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

“Oh Damn!” Giles felt ill. I hope you're joking. It was only when Willow whined miserably and started apologizing—*to him*!—that Giles realized part of his startled response to the demon had been spoken aloud. Willow was tearing up, moments from falling weeping into his arms, an action she was clearly entitled to and didn't deserve to have rebuffed. But the pair had already become an object of intense staring and whispering by both students and faculty in the crowded hallway. “I think perhaps we'd better go into the library and talk,” Giles found himself saying, seeing no better option. That's yet another round to me then! The demon gloated, reminding Giles that on top of everything else, he'd just missed his first and best opportunity of the day to waylay his new Slayer far enough from the library to warn her to avoid that hateful room at all costs.

The moment the library door was closed behind them, Willow and Giles found themselves in one another's arms, clinging to each other while she wept and sobbed out a disjointed, almost totally indecipherable discourse of her misfortune and confusion, while he stroked her hair and murmured half-intelligible words against the top of her head that he hoped were comforting, half understanding her only because he had the demon's hints by which to frame her scattered words into a clear pattern of disaster. Pregnant. He'd gotten this poor child pregnant. He felt deep concern, regret, affection, compassion, confusion, terror, a suffocating sense of responsibility. But somehow, as he had known it must here in this unholy place, this hell-adjacent home-ground of the incubus who had him quite literally by the balls, all of this intense emotion was quickly and seamlessly warped into romantic fervor and sexual passion.

It was hard to say exactly when comforting turned to caressing and sobs to sighs, but it was soon clear that they had. By now both he and Willow were used enough to the feelings stirring between them (and to where those feelings inevitably lead) that neither had to tell the other when it was time to move into Giles's tiny private office with the blinds that closed and the small-but-big-enough leather couch. “It's going to be all right,” Giles still found himself whispering huskily into Willow's hair, her ears, against her throat and breasts as he undressed her and let his hands and mouth roam freely over her body, as she eagerly, actively reciprocated. “Willow! Oh dear, sweet Willow! Everything is going to be all right.”

“Promise?” she sighed around a mouthful of his collarbone, her tiny fingers stroking the length of his cock where it was snugged up against her bare thigh.

And without really intending to, without stopping to examine too closely what he was promising to cause to be 'all right', he promised. “Yes, Willow, my love, my darling, I promise! I swear to you, I will make this right.” Everything that had been said between them (verbally anyway) was so confused that Willow herself might have been unsure about the exact content of his promise. But the physical act of union that followed his words was as traditional a symbol in its own context as a firm handshake at the end of a sales negotiation. It seemed like sufficient clarification.