Back in the Day fic

[doyle]

Title: Controlled Circumstances
Author: Doyle
Characters: Giles, Wesley
Rating: PG
Summary: Giles decides his replacement needs field experience.
Notes: Set right after Bad Girls. For janedavitt. Sorry it's not slashy. Thanks to marymac for betaing: any mistakes that remain are mine.


"Over there!"

Giles gave a perfunctory glance in the direction Wesley indicated, and sighed quietly. What the other man had presumably thought to be a creature of the night was, in fact, a precarious-looking heap of divots and newly-mown grass.

"As a rule, vampires tend to be higher than three feet tall," he pointed out. And not made of foliage, he mentally added.

Wesley rallied admirably. "Ah, but the first rule of counter-subterfuge is 'suspect everything'. A large pile of, um, detritus, could serve as a hiding place for a cunning vampire."

A sudden breeze blew the pile over, making it clear that the only supernatural creatures likely to be lurking underneath it were leprechauns with a fondness for graveyards. Giles was about to share this observation, then thought better of it. One or other of them would inevitably point out that leprechauns didn't exist, and on the Hellmouth that was as good as summoning the little twits.

"There's a… no, that's a tree, isn't it." Wesley cleared his throat. "Must be the lighting. It plays tricks." He made a show of fiddling with the buttons on his torch.

In the past two days, ever since Wesley's arrival in Sunnydale, Giles had had moments of paranoia when he was sure this was all part of some grand plot to torment him. Maybe it was just ego. Quentin Travers presumably had better things to do than plot ways to drive ex-employees out of their minds. But still, every time the new Watcher tried to shoehorn himself into their lives - not to mention their library - he could almost hear, at the back of his mind, Travers' low chuckle.

He allowed himself a certain schadenfreude at the hostility the children were showing the interloper, be it Xander's barbs or Buffy and Faith's outright insubordination. He was all too aware, though, that without the Council's backing, his position was suddenly in question. Oh, he still had his position at the school, and he was more than willing to stay on as an unofficial Watcher, but a few bad reports from Pryce and he could find his visa mysteriously revoked.

The thought of being forced to leave Buffy (and Faith, he added, somewhat belatedly and not without guilt) with a Watcher who wasn't up to scratch terrified him. The debacle in Kakistos's lair had only confirmed that Pryce wasn't so much wet behind the ears as totally drenched. In the end, he'd swallowed his pride and suggested the two of them take a turn around Restfield after the girls patrolled. Ostensibly, it was to let him debrief Pryce on Buffy's history while familiarizing him with Sunnydale. In reality, he just wanted to see some glimmer of a competent Watcher beneath the book-learning and the immaculate suits and the smug composure.

"Tell me about the Council's new training program," he said as they trudged through the cemetery.

Wesley looked delighted, and a little surprised, to be asked to talk. "It's extremely advanced," he said. "Far more practical than in past years. The days of pure theory and dry rhetoric are long gone. The Academy has a new state-of-the-art training facility where students may face actual vampires in…"

"Controlled circumstances," Giles interrupted. "Yes, I remember." The man sounded like he'd swallowed the brochure. "Training facility? A gymnasium, you mean?"

"A simulated vampire nest," he said, sounding as proud as if he'd built it himself. "It looks totally authentic, and dozens of closed-circuit television cameras record every move."

Giles stopped short. Barely having to think about it, he took in their surroundings; they were around two-thirds of the way through the graveyard, between the Anderson crypt and the row of crumbling, ancient headstones. Nothing inhuman in sight, unless he wanted to be very uncharitable and include Wesley in that description. Any vampires in the vicinity would have been taken out already by Buffy and Faith. A right turn would take them back to his car in minutes, but while a finger of scotch and a few hours sleep were infinitely preferable to traipsing around in the dark with his overeager replacement, there was a niggling worry beginning to grow in his mind.

"A simulated nest," he said slowly, hoping he had misunderstood. "Do you mean to tell me that you weren't trained in the field at all?"

He swung his flashlight around and up, the better to see Wesley's expression. He looked uncomprehending, as though Giles had taken to speaking proto-Bantu.

Children, Giles thought heavily. Fools and children were being entrusted with the fate of the world. Travers and the rest spent decades training up people like Wesley, filling their heads with demon lore and Slayer history and locking them up with a drugged vampire in bloody controlled circumstances and pretending they were ready to be Watchers. He wondered if they'd even made Pryce take a stint teaching a Potential, or if they'd just thrown him in here at the deepest of possible deep ends in the blind hope that he wouldn't flounder.

First thing tomorrow he'd get on to every contact he had about protecting his green card.

"Mr. Giles!"

There was barely a second between registering the shout and realizing that this wasn't another false alarm, but it was long enough for the vampire to slam him to the ground. The air was knocked from his lungs and the torch was knocked from his hand, but somehow he kept hold of his stake, and years' worth of instinct let him shove the attacker off and plunge the business end into its chest.

The weight of another body on top of his own vanished as the vampire disintegrated. He tried not to inhale the choking ash as he clambered to his feet and brushed himself down.

Wesley was at his side in an instant - shame he hadn't been there a minute before, Giles noted sourly. "My God, he just appeared from - are you all right?"

Giles waved him off. "Lesson the first," he said, once he could talk without wheezing out lungfuls of dust. "This is the Hellmouth. There are vampires. Quite often, they will appear to come from nowhere. When that happens, all we can do is react, before they kill us." He bent and picked the torch up where it had fallen. The beam flickered, then steadied. "This is real," he said, less sternly, wishing he had a hand free to wipe his glasses. "There are no hidden cameras, no instructors waiting to leap in if you cock it up. There's only you."

Later, when he had time to replay it in his head (because while he didn't have state-of-the-art CCTV he did have an excellent memory, which was far more important in his line of work) he realized that there must have been a nest in the crypt. The vampires seemed to appear from nowhere because they were springing up right behind them.

He spun around at the low growl behind them, seeing in the corner of his eye Wesley doing the same. The pair of vampires were burly, scowling, and giving all appearances of being in the market for a couple of tasty humans. In the thin beam of light they looked utterly monstrous, gold eyes glinting.

For a tense second, two, nobody moved.

"Stay back," Giles cautioned. "I'll…"

Before he could finish, one of the vampires leapt.

And exploded to dust.

The other stopped in mid-lunge, looking in confusion between the two men and the space where his companion wasn't. Then there was the soft thud of a bolt being shot home, and he was gone.

Giles quickly crossed to the entrance of the crypt. It looked empty inside, the rubbish strewn across the stone floor the only sign of its occupation. He pulled the door closed and locked it.

"I don’t think there are more," he said, "but we should leave as swiftly as possible, all the same." He turned.

Wesley was frozen in place, the crossbow still at heart-level. Giles laid a hand over the weapon and gently pushed it down.

"You handle it well." The praise was genuine. He'd only handed over the crossbow when Wesley insisted on carrying it, plus two stakes, plus an axe across his back. He hadn't thought that the man would actually be able to use it, especially at point blank range with a hungry vampire going for his throat.

"I wasn't thinking," Wesley said. His voice wasn't altogether steady. "I just…"

"Reacted?" he suggested. He resisted the unaccountable urge to pat the other man on the shoulder. "It's almost dawn," he said instead. "We should go."

**

Wesley didn't say a word on the way back to the car, and stayed dumbstruck the whole drive to his hotel. Giles savored the prattle-less fifteen minutes. If he was any judge of human nature, once the sun was up and the night felt more like a bad dream Wesley would get over his nerves in a snap. He could foresee a report to Watcher HQ that the older, obsolete ex-Watcher had had to be heroically saved from two (three? Six?) ravenous vampires.

Or maybe Wesley would go away, and think it over, and take some small lesson from it.

At his own flat, Giles poured himself a drink and sipped it slowly, watching the sky outside lighten. His Watcher diary - a habit he couldn't seem to break, and didn't want to - was on the table, and he flipped through to the entry he'd made two days ago. The page was almost blank; just the words "new Watcher" at the top and 'evil?' (reluctantly scored out).

He picked up a pen and tapped it on the page, lost in thought.

Finally, he wrote 'reserving judgement', and closed the book.

END

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