Title: Once Upon A Watcher 2/7
Author: Gail Christison
Rating: A very Christmas PG :-)
Pairing: B/G
Summary: A little of this, a little of that.  An experiment with a fairy tale becomes my Christmas fic this year. Buffy is missing Giles terribly and goes to England to search for him. She's reunited with her father who unfortunately is in trouble...
Timeline: Season 7 Christmas, but the timeline goes AU after, I guess, Conversations With Dead People. Giles is still in England. There's no First. The Council is still there. etc etc. It's a Christmas fic, so it's not that important, really <g>
Disclaimer: Belongs to Joss but someone should teach him how to play with his toys properly.
Feedback: I'd love to know if you enjoyed it. chriscln@ozemail.com.au
Distribution: All those with permission; http://www.wickedsky.com/oncemore very soon.
Author's notes: I'm very late with the Christmas fic this year. As many of you know for the first time in 7 years I had my parents staying through Christmas and New Year's. A great time was had, but very little got done outside of RL . Thankyous to those who've helped me with this one. Thanks Liz, Antonia.
Dedication: To Liz and Antonia with my thanks. You guys rock :-)

Buffy laughed aloud. "I'm not an alien, Dad, and I'm so not immortal." But even as she said the words her heart contracted with pain. "I'm really your kid, only with some extra powers, and way too much responsibility for way too long."

"Powers? X-ray vision? Can you fly?"

Buffy snorted again in spite of herself, then shook her head, still amused. "Major strength, reflexes, focus." She touched a bruise by her mouth then held up a scratched arm where fine lines were showing minor bleeding. "And Slayer healing. By morning I'll be all pretty again."

Hank shook his head. "It's not possible. My kid is the Slayer..."

She frowned. He didn't say that like it was new. "How do you know...?"

"Once I found out demons were real, it wasn't that hard to find out the rest. There are places ...especially in L.A.  Vampires, demons, good and bad, all of it...and the most common topic between those critters when they're socializing? Either the Slayer, or something called Angel Investigations. Last time I was out trying get information a really ugly, annoying little guy was telling a story about how the Slayer stopped the world from ending." He lifted his gaze and his eyes bore into hers. "He said there were rumours that she didn't survive, but was brought back from the dead a few months later..."

After a beat, Buffy nodded slowly, her face pale and her eyes clouded. "I...I had to choose...Dawn or me. I chose me. Willow...Willow brought me back months later, using dark magicks. It was kind of a rough ride."

"No," Hank said softly, shaking his head. "Vampires and demons...a person can see them, believe that they exist...they're other life forms...But magic? Resurrecting my daughter from the dead? A death, by the way, that nobody bothered to tell me about," he added angrily. "No. You're friend is not God. She had no right to tamper with the natural order of things."

"Funny, I sorta said the same thing," Buffy mused almost bitterly. "But I think she thought there wasn't anything natural about it. She thought I'd been trapped in hell. At least I'd like to think so."

Hank was shaking slightly, trying to come to terms with the real breadth of what had been happening to his daughters whilst he had been trapped by his own ambition, stuck in Los Angeles, and anywhere else he had to go to drum up business to survive. The Spanish and Italian connections had failed, and so had Rio and Hamburg. He knew in his heart, though, that he could have tried harder, even to find just a few days...

"Buffy, I'm sorry I wasn't there. I...this is still all so unbelievable, and it's way too late. But I want you to know I've always loved you, honey. Both of you."

"The Ice Show," Buffy said softly, her mind full of images of Giles, of everything that had happened on her eighteenth birthday. "You never told me why you didn't come."

Hank looked away. "Can't blame demons for that," he said, his voice cracking. "It was business. Kayla wanted me to ask one of the junior partners to handle it, but it was..."

Buffy's eyes flashed. "It was your call, and the male ego, among other things, dictated that you had to be the one," she guessed bitterly.

"Something like that," he admitted bleakly.

"Kayla?" Buffy added in an almost jeering tone. "I remember her. I was right... alphabetical bimbos."

"Buffy!" Hank stood, angry, but without a defence. "Judge me all you want, but leave them out of it."

"Oh, I did all my judging these last four years," Buffy told him bitterly. "When I was holding Dawn while she cried because she missed you at Christmas, or on her birthday, or because you missed another one of her growing up milestones; when you didn't come for my eighteenth birthday, and then never explained, when you didn't even call after mom died, not even after Giles tracked you down and sent word. And again when I was standing alone with Dawn at the funeral..."

She stopped for a moment, knowing, with a stab of real pain, that wasn't strictly true, then continued. "And again when I came back from the dead and everything was a mess. No dear old dad to the rescue. How do you think Dawn felt about you not caring enough even to want to check up on her?"

"If anyone had bothered to tell me you were dead I would have moved heaven and earth to..." He trailed off.

Buffy watched him, her eyes full, her mouth trembling. She'd never seen him as disconsolate or helpless before and somehow, his refusal to make excuses or blame his girlfriends for his failures made her realise that he was just a person...a very human person, with flaws and failings, but one who still had a heart, and who, underneath it all, was still the father she remembered. At that point she understood much better why he'd aged prematurely, why the grey hairs, the lines that were never in his boyish face before.

"We're going to see the Overseer tomorrow, aren't we?" Hank asked while she was still deep in thought.

She went to him, sat down and put her arms around him, closing her eyes when his engulfed her.

"It's going to be okay, Daddy. We'll make it okay," she whispered, and let herself be lost for a time in the memories of childhood and the security of a father's embrace.

*******

"I'm not sure that old lady is going to recover from seeing us go poof," Buffy growled in a low voice when they blinked and looked around, finding themselves in what was almost certainly a demon dimension.

Hank was too stressed to laugh, but he managed a weak smile. The old woman had been feeding pigeons around the statue, and had come into view at exactly the wrong moment.

Buffy stared at the wide, square body of Cyrelle as he walked in front of them, unconcerned about watching his back. With the relevant demon senses, he would probably know they were going to try anything before they did.

"Blue trees and green sky. Silver flowers and red water. Kind of tacky...like Star Trek...the original kind, wouldn't you say?" she drawled.

Cyrelle shrugged without turning, disappointing the Slayer. "It's not my world. I never heard of a dimension called Star Trek. What demons live there?"

"Little ones in gold shirts who can't keep their zipper closed and green ones with pointy ears, oh, and big tall ones with bumpy heads...no wait, that was later." Buffy sighed, her clever reply shot. "This place is giving me the creeps. What does the Overseer need my dad for if there's nothing here but psychedelic scenery? No, wait. Please tell me this Overseer isn't trying to get back to the Human world...tell me he's not a totally ugly, really anaemic dude with a face full of teeth, a thing for blood and an allergy to sunlight?"

"He is not," Cyrelle said, again, without turning.

A few minutes later they seemed to go almost 'between'. Buffy couldn't explain it, even to herself, but one moment they were in a grove of horribly yellow trees and the next they were in an equally tacky room.

Cyrelle seemed to melt into the background as a door closed behind them. One Buffy couldn't remember passing through.

Moments later the room filled with a presence, though no corporeal being appeared. "Why do you come here, Slayer?" a disembodied voice asked, more in her head than aloud.

Buffy looked around her, not liking the sense of suffocating presence all around her. "Because this man deserves a chance to pay his debt. Because I want to know what you're going to do with him?"

"He is nothing but refuse. His life is forfeit. It is mine."

Buffy swung to look at her father, who was turning white before her eyes.

"NO!!" she screamed. "Take me instead."  Hank fell to the ground, gasping and jerking as his body spasmed. "Tell me what you're doing to him, then take me instead!"

"Take you?" the voice repeated, as though not quite grasping the idea of self-sacrifice. "I cannot. The energy of a Slayer would destabilize my world..."

Buffy, on the ground now, trying to help her father, took a moment to digest that while dragging him into her arms. "Are you trying to tell me you eat the energy of human beings to power...this place? Like, you're a kind of furnace, or power station or freaking Enron or something? Do people here have shares in you or something?"

"His life is forfeit," the voice insisted, ignoring Buffy's facetiousness.

"Yeah, yeah," Buffy growled, barely controlling her panic, "but why don't we, for the sake of argument, wait until we've finished this discussion before killing him?"

She looked all around her at the silence that followed, then down to watch the colour return to her father's face slowly.

"You heard me," she insisted. "Take me, instead. If you're a demon, you've gotta get brownie points for taking the Slayer off the streets."

There was silence for an interminable time.

"Very well," the voice said at length and in the time it took for his last syllable to fade, Hank was gone.

"What did you do with him?" she demanded frantically.

"Be still. He has been returned whence he came. You are forfeit in his place."

Cold dread lanced through Buffy. The relief that her father was safe, and somehow, she knew he was, was now replaced with fear, and with the pain of knowing she would never find Giles, that she might never see him again, even if she lived beyond the next few minutes...

"What do I have to do?"

"That depends on you."

Buffy wheeled around, her eyes narrowing as she stared into Cyrelle's violet ones. The presence was fading from the room. "Why do I have the feeling that I've been set up?" she growled, her Slayer senses doing a jig. Those senses hadn't been more than normally aggravated by the almighty Overseer. Cyrelle, on the other hand, managed to tilt the machine every time he came near her.

"You do not disappoint," a voice said, though Cyrelle's lips didn't move.

Buffy rolled her eyes. "You're another thingy dude like the Overseer...only you're actually here and he wasn't... Actually here, I mean. You just hitch a ride with stupid, here?" she asked, pointing at the now glazed eyes of the demon, standing like a wound-down toy.

"You belong to me now."

"Man...er...thin air...of few words," Buffy retorted, more bravado than real calm, then freaked as she found the reality around her melting, to be replaced by a large, mansion-y looking entrance hall. It was as alien to her as the Overseer's acid trip, but at least it was human...hopefully.

She looked around. Black and white tiled floor, really, really old...as in antique-y. Carved wooden cabinets, some with glass doors, filled with what looked like porcelain figures and fine glass figurines; a chandelier, like something out of Phantom of the Opera, and a huge, winding staircase, surrounded her.

"Wow. Big day for the clichés," she said aloud.

When nothing answered her but the faint echo of her own voice, she turned slowly to check out the front doors. They were huge, heavy and looked decidedly locked. Before she could step toward them, a voice halted her.

"Welcome."

She wheeled. It was a cross between a predatory growl and a throaty baritone. She swallowed.

"Are you working solo, or are you another taxi cab for one of those no-actual-body guys?"

The figure on the staircase blinked and tilted his huge head. He hadn't seen anyone in a very long time, Human or otherwise, but those who had seen him in the past...those whom the Overseer had sent to him...had all been too horrified or too self-conscious to look him in the eye. All had been swiftly taken away again. Yet this slip of a girl was holding a conversation with him as though he were some local she'd met on the street.

"I have no name."

Buffy heard the question in his tone. "Buffy. Buffy Summers," she told him, wondering how that was possible. "So what do people call you?"

He looked away. "I generally try not to hear what they call me."

"What is this place? Why was I sent here? What are you to the Overseer?" she demanded, her patience worn thin by everything that had happened to her, the distinct lack of explanations and a sudden over overwhelming surge in her need to see Giles again.

"Patience," the creature growled and descended the rest of the stairs. He walked as an animal might if it were raised to stand on its hind legs, as though his knees bent the wrong way.

When he reached her, he towered over her, her brow only reaching the bottom of his sternum.

Buffy expected him to smell all doggy or horsy or at worst, like the hyena cage at the zoo, but despite the fawn coloured hair that seemed to cover his body and face, the huge jaw, triangular, canine ears and fairly stunning canine teeth, he smelled of herbs and the soft fur on a puppy's head.

He was dressed in jeans with a heavy belt, boots, and a heavy, black collared shirt buttoned two from the top.

"Well, you dress better than most demons I've known," she said, looking up at him.

He seemed to smirk for the barest moment before becoming serious again, staring down at her with surprisingly soft brown eyes. "You have been sent here to keep me company. The Overseer needs me, needs my services, but I get... I haven't been able to work lately."

"So why doesn't he just kill you and get someone else?"

The creature's eyes grew melancholy. "I'm told there is no other who can perform the tasks I perform. He can punish me, and rage at me, but he cannot kill me until he finds a replacement. Since none of those things worked, he decided, once again, to try to address the problem, in his usual ham-fisted manner."

Buffy frowned. Something about the creature was wigging her, way beyond any normal wiggins, but she couldn't put a finger on it.

"You don't exactly look or act like the regular kind of demon I fight. Are we in your dimension?"

He shook his head slowly. "We are in Yorkshire."

"I'm still in England?"

"Back in England," he corrected and raised a hand before she could ask more questions. "We're a long way from civilization and no, we are not allowed to leave."

"Great. I'm so going to kill my father when I get back."

"When?" He made the word a question.

Buffy made a face at her captor. "When," she repeated stubbornly then froze, before raising her eyes very slowly. "Tell me," she said very slowly, "that they don't actually want me to marry you, or mate with you and make Super-Slayers, or something equally ookie?"

He had been watching her with something approaching admiration for her lack of fear, poise and ability to make light of a serious situation. Now his face dropped. "No. Nothing as foolish as that," he told her softly, unable to prevent her from seeing the hurt in his eyes.

There was regret in hers for a moment, but she was too angry with the Overseer, her father and life in general, to linger on the thought.

"Look, tell me what I'm supposed to do. How can I do anything here if I don't know what Mister 'where's-my-body' wants me to do?"

"You are here to be with me. No more, no less."

"Um...I think we've already been this way."

The creature shook his head. "A companion," he growled. "Will it appal and revolt you so much to be a companion to one such as I?"

Buffy sighed a heavy, frustrated sigh. "Get over yourself, already. I've been way past appal and revolt," she growled. "You're a teddy bear compared to some of the guys in my past." She reached up unaffectedly and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. "And you're warm, which has to be a major plus. So can we move on to where I sleep and whether being your companion is going to eventually involve shared bodily warmth? I so don't want to have to kill you."

He blinked. There was strength in her voice, though her tone was dry, and yet there was a sense there that given reason to, she would most certainly kill him.

"As I said. You are here to be my companion. The Overseer believes that if I have a companion I will..." He paused for a long moment, as though talking about himself was utterly foreign to him. "That I might cease to have nightmares, to be so restless...so... lonely."

"Let me guess: he expects bringing me here to increase workplace performance and output from you?"

Again the creature looked nonplussed for a moment, then nodded.

"Just great," she growled, her eyes widening when her stomach followed the words with a loud growl of its own. "Food," she announced suddenly.

"Food?"

"As in I'm hungry and thirsty and if I'm going to be stuck here, I should know where to go to find it when I need it."

"Would you not prefer to see your rooms first?"

Buffy's curiosity overcame her hunger. If she was going to be stuck here for any amount of time it was reassuring to know she wasn't going to have to sleep in his bed, or at his feet or on the stupid kitchen hearth like Cinder-freakin'-ella.  "I have rooms? You mean like a hotel suite?" She gestured and he led the way.

There were, indeed, rooms. A large door opened into a sitting area furnished with antiques, but with a woman's presence in mind. There was soft rose and grey carpet, matching rose and cream drapes, furniture definitely looking like something boudoir-ish out of a period novel and a huge cream bowl of open, and half open, pink roses on the small table by the sitting chair. They were unexpectedly real and fragrant.

Beyond it she could see a bedroom through an open door. Inside there was huge bed with an equally huge patchwork quilt. More antiques, porcelain figures, and long, heavy cream drapes patterned delicately with blown pink roses and soft green leaves, covered the bedroom windows. There was also a bathroom. It had been modernised, tiled in grey tiles, with a replica cream coloured antique vanity, a shower over a matching cream coloured antique bathtub with legs, and shiny pewter-look fittings all round.

Someone had really attempted to cater for a woman's needs. There was an assortment of unopened items on it from shampoo to cosmetics, even feminine hygiene products. Those made her chuckle in spite of the ludicrousness of her situation.

"Something is wrong?" he rumbled from the bedroom.

"Good ears," she muttered. "No. Someone was pretty thorough, though."

"We are a long way from anywhere. Your needs had to be accounted for," he explained patiently. "Are the accommodations acceptable?"

Buffy strolled back out. "Not really," she said honestly. "But they're okay for a prison...actually they're kinda pretty," she conceded, picking up a priceless shepherdess figurine and wandering over to the drapes.

The creature watched her open them with one hand and stare out past the grey, unwelcoming weather, to the endless moors beyond.

"It is supposed to be a prison, isn't it?" she asked, his sensitive ears detecting the first faint note of despair in her voice.

"It was made so."

"Where did you live before?"

His shoulders drooped. "I do not know."

"You don't remember?" He shook his head. "Did you get hit on the head?"

His eyes grew amused and his lip quirked. "Not to my knowledge."

"Then why...?"

He shook his head again. "All I know is that I am here now."

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