Rupert Giles woke from a heavy unfulfilling sleep with a nauseating taste in his mouth and pinpricks down both legs.  His bladder was acutely swollen and painful.

Blearily, he lifted his head and looked around.

He was in his apartment on his sofa.  He tried to move his legs in order to sit up, discovered he couldn't, and glanced down to find a dark-haired head on his thigh and a slender arm pressed into his groin.  His bladder was not so much swollen as being dug into by…..he raised his head more and his eyebrows shot up…..by Cordelia?

*How the hell?* he wondered.

After a lot of effort, he managed to raise up on one elbow.  He remembered the hospital, the Demerol, and a vague recollection of falling asleep in the midst of a lot of noise and white things.

Using his one free hand, he gently probed the top of his head.  There were the stitches.  He winced.  And a bump.

His bladder twinged.  Giles moved Cordelia's arm and tried to slide his legs from under her.  She stirred at the touch then, cat-like, snatched at the movement under her and curled up more tightly into a ball.

"Cordelia."  He shook her shoulder, all the while praying she wouldn't grab at anything more.  "Cordelia!"

She mumbled something.

"Cordelia, it's Giles, not, uh, Xander."

That woke her.  Her eyes opened and met his for a second before she launched herself into the far end of the couch.  "Of course *not* Xander!" she shot at him.

He didn't wait for her to say anything further.  Giles stumbled to the bathroom and, after relieving the first urgent matter, cautiously eyed himself in the mirror.

He badly needed a shave and a yellow bruise along his jaw line indicated it would not be a painless activity.  Dark shadows under his eyes contrasted terribly with the white pallor of his skin and the hair on his forehead was matted down with dried blood.

He washed his face, sucking in his breath every time the washcloth brushed a tender spot, and rinsed the blood out of his hair.  He returned to the living room and glanced around, then heard the kettle.

Cordelia pulled rumples out of her sweater as she put instant coffee in a mug.  She gave him a quick but studied look before declaring, "If this is what you look like first thing in the morning, you'd better only have a relationship with a woman who has cataracts.  Are you finally finished in the bathroom?"

He ran the cold water tap and got a glass.  "There's another bathroom upstairs."

"Up where your bedroom is?  Ick!" she said.  "That's a little too much intimacy, not that waking up on top of you wasn't.  And if you ever breathe a word of it to anyone--"

"Believe me, it reflects badly on me too."  Giles took a cautious swallow of water then pressed the cool glass to his forehead.

She thought for a moment.  "Because it would make you a pervert or was that an insult?"

"The kettle's boiling, Cordelia."  He returned to the living room and sat down.  When she returned to the living room, she found him eyeing the popsicle wrappers curiously.

"Where did all these come from?" he asked.

"You insisted we buy them while we were waiting for your prescription to be filled at that midnight pharmacy.  By the way, if you have smudges on your pants, it's because you kept trying to crawl up beside the cash register."

"What prescription?  What pharmacy?"

She sighed and went into the kitchen, coming back a few moments later with her coffee and a bottle.  "Painkillers," she said, tossing them to him before sitting down in a chair.  "I think you should avoid Demerol, Giles.  It gives you both the munchies and memory loss."

He eyed the wrappers.  "I ate all those?"

"I had a grape one.  You ate the other five including both chocolate.  Then you wanted tea.  I wasn't going to go to all that trouble so I made you coffee and told you it was tea.  How old is this coffee anyway?" she asked with a grimace.

"I, um, bought it once for company."  Giles stared at her.  "I don't remember any of this."

"Lucky you," she muttered, rubbed at a spot on her sweater.  "Damn, I think this is blood.  *Your* blood."

Haltingly, he asked, "Did anything…..else…..happen?"

She was still looking down at her top.  "I liked this sweater too."

"I'll pay for the dry cleaning," he said.  "Cordelia--"

She shook her head.  "The stains don't come out.  I've been this route before."

"Then I'll buy you another one," he said sharply.  "Cordelia, did I…..dress myself because I, uh, appear to be missing a certain article of clothing."

"You wouldn't let me put your underwear back on."

Giles gave her a look of horror which she returned matter-of-factly.  "You were pretty insistent on that point.  I wasn't going to argue."

"You couldn't find a nurse to, um, do it instead?"

"They made some joke about you getting your money's worth and pretended to be busy.  I wish my father was a lawyer.  It would be useful right about now."

Giles shifted uncomfortably.  "Oh my Lord," he murmured, partly from what he could imagine but mainly because it was starting to come back to him.

"It was like dressing a Ken doll only your arms bend better."  Cordelia took a swallow out of her mug.  "You'd better buy new coffee if you have anyone else over.  Unless you don't like them."  She gave up on the coffee and, putting down the cup, stood.  "I'm calling a cab which you're paying for.  And if anyone asks, I was never here.  God, can you imagine if anyone had seen us twenty minutes ago?  I'd never be able to raise my head in this town again."

He couldn't look at her.  To the floor, he said, "I'll get my wallet."

"I've got it."  She retrieved the billfold out of her purse and extracted a twenty.  She tossed it on the table and added, "Your keys and suspenders are by the front door.  I'm not sure where your tie is."  She paused at the doorway.  "I put up with an awful lot last night, Giles.  You could say thank you."

The look he bestowed upon her caused her to sigh in frustration before pacing down the hall and letting herself out.

---

Buffy stopped at the library doors.  "Maybe I shouldn't."

Willow had half-expected this despite their conversation at Denny's yesterday morning and the long discussion on the phone last night.  "You always feel better after you talk to Giles."

"But that's about Watcher-Slayer stuff.  This is Watcher-Cordelia stuff," Buffy said.  "And what's with her anyway, acting like nothing happened?"

"You talked with Cordelia?" Willow asked.

"No, but you were there during study period when she was endlessly yapping with Harmony.  She sounded like she spent all Saturday at the mall, like nothing out of the ordinary happened."

"How do you think she should act?"

"Differently.  We're talking about Giles," Buffy said.  "And what was the deal with all those popsicles anyway?  I saw six wrappers.  What do you do with *six* popsicles?"

"I don't know," Willow said.  "Popsicles seem harmless enough."

"Yeah?  Well, then, it's what they did afterwards.  She was only supposed to drop him off at the hospital, not spend the night with him on the couch."

"They were dressed."

"But he look rumpled," Buffy said.  "I mean, where was the tie?  He's never without a tie.  Remember, Will, after the hellmouth opened and we had big reeking ugly in here waving tentacles around - he still had his tie afterwards."

"Are you comparing Cordelia to the hellmouth?" Willow asked dubiously.  She nudged Buffy towards the library doors.  "I think you should talk to Giles."

"Maybe--" Buffy started but Willow pointed, turned, and walked away.

The lamps were on behind the counter and in the stacks but the main light over the table was off.  As the door closed behind her in the gloom, Buffy called, "Giles?"

His office was empty and so was the rare book cage.  She walked up the stairs, through the dim light from the frosted windows, and around the curve of the room.

An annex led off the last stack, a fault in the architect's design that had left a nook the size of a window seat and a clear pane of glass just big enough for one person to look through.  Willow liked to read in there and Buffy had curled up in it once herself when she'd wanted to be alone, looking out over an empty football field during a drizzly day.

She stopped at the last shelf of books.  Giles was in the nook, sitting with one leg on the sill and his glasses balanced on the other, looking quietly out the window.  His unguarded expression, pensive, a little sad, startled her.

"Giles?" she said.

In a heartbeat, the guard dropped back down.  He put on his glasses as he turned and his face was the same as she had always known.

"Nice shiner," Buffy said.  "Does it hurt?"

He touched the bruise under his one cheek.  "No."

"Good," she said.  She stood for a few minutes longer.  "Well, I just wanted to make sure you were ok."  She spun around, stopped, swung back determinedly, faltered, and finally withdrew to the main floor.

She heard his steps follow her.  "Buffy, is something wrong?"

"No," she said, forcefully bright.  "It's Monday, the beginning of another long school week, I forgot my lunch at home, and everything's just peachy."

He frowned briefly before gathering up some books to be reshelved.  "After your last class, would you stop in here please?  We need to discuss what happened Saturday night."

"You know what, Giles?  I've decided you're an adult and it's entirely your business."

Baffled, he asked, "We are talking about the patrol, no?"

"Oh!" Buffy said.  "Of course we are.  And if Willow comes in here later, she's talking about the same thing."  She went out the door.