Title: An Aussie Valentine
Author: Gail Christison

(notes and disclaimer with part one)

Part 2

Finally, he nodded and let a ghost of a smile touch his lips, before turning his head slightly to press them to her temple. "When it's time," he said softly, "we'll deal with all of it."

"True, but I didn't really think you'd want to stay anywhere with a view of Sydney Airport, as impressively clean and ordered as it looks, compared to some."

"Do I need to navigate?" She asked as Giles took a turning that had a sign indicating a number of weirdly named suburbs, but nothing resembling the word 'Sydney'.

"Not unless you want to. I studied the route in the street directory, while you were asleep."

Soon after that Buffy felt into a fitful doze until they reached the city proper and Giles mentioned as much in a voice calculated to rouse her. She looked around blearily at the car filled streets and collection of heritage and brand-new architecture.

"Kinda small for the country's capital."

"It's not the capital. The capital is Canberra. Bloody Americans."

Buffy poked out her tongue. "I still expected it to be bigger."

"Doesn't need to be. Part of its charm is in its blend of old and new, masonry and trees...and of course, the sea."

"Aussies are big with the trees...and the grass," she observed as they skirted a park with huge trees and a big war memorial, people sitting on park seats and on the grass, and lots of seagulls and other weird, black-headed birds wandering around, which Giles informed her were a type of ibis.

"We keep passing hotels," she mused. "We're not going to the 'Y', are we?"

"Very funny," he drawled as they stopped at yet *another* set of lights and the ubiquitous gaggle of pedestrians straggled across the road. "Patience."

As it turned out Buffy only had to wait a few more minutes before they turned into the elegant entrance of their hotel. None-the-wiser as to why this particular hotel, other than the looming presence of both the Opera house and the bridge, she followed Giles inside after he spoke to the doorman, signed something, and handed him the keys. After all the time they'd spent on the road in England, she was used to the whole drill and not even particularly distracted by the impressive décor of the lobby, only bone-weary and looking forward to relaxing. She asked no questions until they were alone in the elevator. Even then there were no words, just silently turning to look up at her lover, who smiled down tenderly and responded to the invitation in her eyes, gathering her in his arms and kissing her lingeringly as the lift continued to climb.

The room was several levels more splendiferous than Buffy expected, based on the hotels they'd stayed in driving across Europe. She looked up at Giles and quirked an eyebrow as the baggage arrived, pushed into the room on a cart and off-loaded by a laid-back looking bellboy...or whatever the local equivalent was.

He indicated the window. "There's a balcony," he said, before turning to thank the young man and offer him a tip.

Buffy drew the curtains back and slid open the glass door. The view took her breath. Now she began to understand what it was about Sydney. No city had a right to this kind of beauty. Cities were, in her experience, either old and cramped like the European ones, or concrete jungles, like a lot of American cities: stark and often cold and dirty, especially in the dead of night when she generally got a chance to experience them...

In the bright summer sunshine, the harbour was almost painfully blue, fringed by a mixture of buildings and trees and dotted everywhere with sailboats, powerboats, even a hydrofoil or two. Nearby there was a plaza area around the water with people wandering to and fro, but it was the harbour itself that captured her...peaceful, beautiful and oblivious to darkness, chaos and the kind of pain they were both still emerging from.

Her eyes grew very bright as she continued to watch the ordinary, uncomplicated, movement of life...all of which continued without fire falling from the sky, demons suddenly springing up from nowhere, or friends dying around her...or people knocking on her door to tell her the world was about to end, yet again.

Eventually she felt his presence behind her and leaned back against the rock that was her lover, friend, and mentor. "Are we ever going to be allowed to be like them? Will it ever end?"

He slid his arms around her and drew her even closer, resting his chin comfortingly on her hair.

"I don't really think I need to answer that. We can, however, make our own small oases of peace and even happiness, if we want it badly enough."

At that Buffy freed herself from his embrace and turned to face him. "You still have doubts?"

He shook his head. "Do you?"

Her expression was serious. "None. For the first time in my life, there are no qualifiers. Just...none...whatsover."

He answered with a slow growing smile then bent his head for a long, sweet kiss, before sweeping her up, giggling, and carrying her the short distance to the bed, where he kissed her into silence again. Clothes fell away with the ease of lovers who know each other too well, and caresses fanned flames their tired bodies weren't ready to embrace.

After yet another passionate kiss, Buffy lifted her head and looked down into the now smoky green eyes.

"Much as I love you, I can't do this without at least a week's sleep, preferably after a long shower. Do you know how long it is since we last showered?"

He rolled his eyes at her and caressed long strands of tangled blonde hair away from her eyes. "Are you insinuating that I smell?"

She giggled. "We probably both do. Come with me?"

The bathroom was luxurious, the bath king-sized, but Buffy was intent on a shower, the longer, the better. Giles followed her under the generous blast of steaming water and drew her back against his chest, both their heads getting very wet. They closed their eyes and let the heat permeate tired and still-kinked bodies from hours of sitting in the same position, or trying to sleep in their seats on the plane despite all the modern comforts.

When they finally stirred, Buffy turned to slide her arms around him and lay her cheek against his chest.

"God, I'm tired. I wish we could just go somewhere...just you and me...and all we'd have to do is eat and sleep and make love. No fighting, no evil, no pain...no planes, even...just the two of us...together.

"As we are right now?" He asked softly, caressing the shell of her ear with his lips.

She groaned and turned to arch her back against him again. "Kinda...if there weren't any special stones or elders or rituals waiting around the corner..."

Giles' fingers played expertly over the lithe body, finding all of her favourite spots, small, sensitive places, behind a breast, near her ears, in the sensitive skin of her wrists, before finally cupping the creamy flesh of her full breasts, unable to resist a smile of pleasure that her figure had returned to its former glory, the fashion imperative to starve to the point of emaciation and flat chest, thankfully no longer in vogue. He'd missed that about her...the healthy fullness and curves of a womanly body...one she had once been more than amply blessed with and which he hoped she'd want to retain enough now to take rather more care of herself. With a Slayer metabolism, night air and frozen yoghurt simply weren't enough...

"Mmm...you trying to wake me up?" she growled.

He smiled. "If I was awake myself, I might be able to answer that question," he replied ruefully.

Buffy turned, ignoring the lusty blast of spray, and snuggled against him, enjoying the strong bands that were his arms closing around her once again.

"You are so in trouble when we wake up," she sighed, and felt the movement of his chest as he chuckled and reached for their towels.

They slept deeply for several hours longer than they intended and woke to a breath-taking sunset.

True to her word, Buffy moved over her lover and kissed him awake, amused to see the confusion in his eyes as they focused.

"Afternoon."

He squinted at the gap in the curtains, and the fiery sky beyond. "Apparently. Or later," he agreed and shifted to make the contact between them even more intimate. "To what, um, do I owe the pleasure of your," his hands slid down her back, "company?"

"Would you believe I'm here to repossess your car?"

His hands continued to roam. "Hmm...not remotely."

Buffy groaned and arched. "Avon calling?"

He snickered and ran the tip of his tongue around the inner shell of her ear, making the groan into a whimper as well.

"Would you believe I'd just like you to have these two free magazines...?"

He slapped her rump playfully and rolled her over before kissing her until she could barely breathe. Soon she was kissing him back with the same ferocity, making his nerve endings surge as her Slayer drive called to him in that most primitive of ways.

When he responded, their lovemaking exploded into a frenzy of mutual demand, each of them starving for every touch, every taste of each other, diving in at will to drive each other mad with tongues and fingertips and lips, until finally Buffy moved to take Giles in her mouth, hungrily devouring him to the point where he was vocalising enough to make her bless the sound proofing.

He arched his back as the velvet lips once again closed in vice like fashion to move up and down his length in torturous provocation, and growled low and deep in his throat, making Buffy, who knew what was coming next, smile.

In moments he'd lifted her and thrown her back against the mattress as he moved between her thighs. Her body surged in anticipation as strong hands slid around her hips to cup firm globes and pull her hips forcefully up to meet his desire. She opened herself even wider and cried out her wanton pleasure as his rock hard member unerringly found and imbedded itself in her heat, and her thighs closed possessively around him.

They both began to move then, matching each other's desire and abandoning themselves to the wild, animal pleasure of it, coupling and uncoupling, licking, kissing, touching, and coupling again, until finally Buffy moved from Giles' expert tormenting of her sex, to her knees, moving them slightly apart as she laid her head on the bed and slid her hands back over her buttocks, smiling at his raggedly indrawn breath and the feel of his fingers irresistibly drawn to touch and to trail over her tender, beautifully displayed...just for him...flesh. Then it was her turn to gasp as, without warning, he shifted, his tongue sliding across her opening and up to caress her throbbing centre.

He smiled at the sound as he straightened and moved to slide back inside her, barely able now to hold back the tide, as she immediately thrust back against him, demanding wantonly to service and be serviced. It was time. Kneading the soft creamy curves, he began to move faster and faster, driven by her calls, and the wild gyrations of her body as he pounded into her.

In front of him, Buffy's conscious mind had taken a sabbatical, leaving her aware of little else but the overwhelming pleasure and wantonness that was surging through her, the feel of her lover taking her in such a way, the crazy-making stimulation of his manhood slamming against her heat as they struggled together towards ecstasy. She shifted her hips one last time to change the angle just enough to...

Then all conscious thought fled once again.

"Oh...Oh God, Giles! Please, yes...oh..." The rest of her sentence lost in inarticulate gasps, she writhed frantically as wave after wave of exploding pleasure rolled out from the deepest core of her being, and hurled outward through every nerve ending in her body...

Giles roared as she began to spasm, the sound of ecstasy in her cries and the sensations of her pleasure bringing his own orgasm from his toes...The world went red as he arched violently into her still writhing, still demanding, body, and came over and over until he was breathless.

Finally, he kissed her shoulder blade, prompting her, as always, to turn over and snuggle into his chest as he lay beside her and passed a handful of hotel tissues. They stayed curled together for a long time, content, as ever, after their lovemaking, but also ever in awe of the power of their shared passion.

Giles had always known that Slayers had extraordinary sex-drives when unleashed, but until Giles, Buffy had never found a Human lover who could match the Slayer, power for power and need for need. It took her breath away...to know that she could truly love... truly want...someone without ever having to deny who she was again.

Buffy followed her final thought through and pushed up on to one elbow so she could look at his face. His hair was a mess from her fingers dragging through it, and she played with it idly while studying the face and the eyes looking back up at her.

"What?"

"Just trying to convince myself it isn't a dream. That, not only am I so happy it's almost weird, but you're happy. Giles, I never talked about it before, but I never believed I could make anyone truly happy. In case you hadn't noticed, everything I touched in the last seven years either broke, died or turned evil."

He traced the curve of her throat with a forefinger. "Well, I don't seem to be in danger of doing any of those things...though that position earlier, where..."

"Giles!" she giggled. "I never would have thought you were that flexible either. I was impressed..." Her face gradually grew serious again. "But you know what I meant."

"I know," he said softly. "And for the most part, I know why. You are only just beginning to discover who you really are, to understand that you are not defined by someone else...but by what is in you to be."

"But...Spike..." She blurted, unable to stop herself.

His expression grew dark, but his eyes remained gentle. "Yes. Spike."

She shrugged. "At first I just wanted the emptiness to stop...then...what he said I was...what he wanted...the darkness...the rage...it just all came out and I almost let it take me. It scared me but he...he loved it..."

"Of course," he said quietly, easing himself into a sitting position, so that Buffy also sat back. "It was his essence...and his triumph: reshaping you into his perfect mate...pulling you...pulling the Slayer...ever further from the light...and the truth."

She frowned. "Maybe talking about Evil!Buffy wasn't such a good idea, after all. I mean: he got a soul, Giles..."

"When he realised he couldn't hold you any other way. You were an obsession, Buffy. And you mistook that for...well...you thought he could give you something the demon in that body could never truly give anyone. When he thought there was no other way to 'win' as it were, he did the only thing he could, played the only card he had left...but don't ever think he did it for anyone but himself. And he proved over and over that in essence he was little better afterward than he was before."

"Except at the end," she said tonelessly, indicating to Giles that she still hadn't really come to terms with that part of her life.

"Yes. Except for the end. At some point in our lives we will all have a choice like his...granted perhaps not quite as spectacular...to make. In a no win scenario he made the only choice I would expect Spike to make. In point of fact, when he accepted the amulet from you he didn't even know that he would be making the ultimate sacrifice, only that being the 'champion' would impress the hell out of you."

She closed her eyes momentarily against that particular item. "But we did win."

"He didn't. Ultimately, either way, he couldn't have you. Either he didn't use the amulet...or let it use him...and you died with everyone else that day...and he loses, or else..."

She frowned. "He does...did. Same result. I get what you're saying, but he was...he did have good in him. I know he did. That's why I-"

"Why you supported him even when the rest of us believed you were very wrong?"

She looked away. "He had a soul."

"He's not Angel, Buffy," Giles said quietly, but the words rang through the elegant room.

Her eyes flicked up to his.

Giles sighed. "Your only way of dealing with what Angel was...what he is...and what he did to you...to all of us...when he was turned again...was to hold on to the belief that his soul sets him apart...somehow makes him truly human and not demon, and therefore worthy. But even Angel is not human, and Spike is not Angel. Angel spent almost a century defining his 'humanity' if you like, and evolving into the person we know...the person I...w-we trusted. And he did that despite being ensouled, basically against his will, twice. Spike, on the other hand, showed vanishingly little progress after he got his soul back, despite every opportunity to demonstrate otherwise. You were, in effect, still his only agenda. "

"I-is that why you helped Robin?"

He stared at her for a long moment. "I want you to think, Buffy, and then I want you to tell me why I did what I did that day."

She stared at him for a long moment, then dropped her gaze. "Well it *was* kind of stupid to tell me about it while we were patrolling." She bit her lip and looked him in the eye. "At the time I thought you'd given up on me. I thought ..."

"That I betrayed you," he said softly.

Buffy nodded. "Now...now I know you didn't...give up on me I mean...but I don't..." She seemed to drift away for a long moment, then return suddenly. "You weren't doing it to punish him. You were doing it to protect the others. You thought I was going to screw up again," she announced, her tone half annoyed, half surprised at how easy it was to see now, so long after the event, things she should have seen a long time ago...

"Partly," he conceded. "In simple terms Spike was a time bomb with no possible way to defuse him. Eliminating him was not the only option at the beginning...but it became the only one when you refused to even consider the safety of your sister and everyone else around you. That situation need never have occurred if you had made different choices."

"Story of my life," she muttered. "I did what I thought was best at the time. I grant you, some of those decisions seem incredibly stupid now, but I thought...I thought..."

"You thought what? That the First's trigger would go away by itself?" He half-snapped: the first indication that his patience was beginning to falter, or that the scars were still way too raw.

Buffy's eyes flicked up to his, both anger and regret in them. For a beat it looked as though she was going to yell back at him, but they'd played that scene before, each pouring out the months of unresolved anger and disappointment in each other, knowing that they could not move into an intimate relationship without it. She never wanted to go back to that place...of yelling, rage, and hurting...again.

"Stupid is as stupid does," she said slowly, in vaguely Gump-ish intonation. "I don't know why I thought I could take care of it, or that he could control it. The more I think about it now the more it makes my head hurt. We...you and me...we hurt each other a lot after I came, y'know, *back*, thanks to Will...most of which we've already talked about, I know," she added quickly. "But I don't have to be Einstein to know that in some ways it way worse for you last year, and that it was my fault. The sad part about it is I have no idea why, other than at the time...after you took Willow back to England, and things started to change...then the First...I felt like I was totally on my own...like I just couldn't stop...couldn't see what was happening to me...to all of us. I was so *blind*. I must have the I.Q. of a Cheeto."