After eating several more fruit for supper, despite the fact that both of them were experiencing mildly upset stomachs, with the usual consequences, they turned in without having built their new shelter. The rest of the day had not been wasted, however.

Giles had found plants and leaves that suited his purpose, but wasn't happy with any of the possibilities for the frame. They'd brought back armfuls of palm and other thick or tough and very colourful leaves, and huge amounts of stems from another kind of plant that frayed when they cut it. Giles said it was a good thing, but they were so tired by the time they'd carried back multiple loads, picked more fruit and followed one of Buffy's weird ducks for over an hour until they found out it was a courting male and not a sitting female, and therefore didn't have a nest for them to find, that shelter-building had been postponed for another day.

By mid-morning the following morning, they'd made about four miles upstream, exploring new territory, without straying too far from their best landmark. Giles was blazing trees anyway, but until they were more comfortable with their environs they wanted the security of being able to follow the watercourse back to their campsite.

They'd turned Giles' t-shirt into a sack with some improvised knots in the sleeves and one to close the neck. It hadn't taken long to fill it with several kinds of fruit and some weird pods Buffy wanted to open to see if they could be cleaned out and used to serve food in. They were the size of Giles' hand, olive coloured and bumpy, but they were the first things they'd found that looked like they could hold…something…at least.

Buffy stopped at a huge thicket, tired of chopping and bashing stuff out of the way. “We should rest for a bit. Water might not be an issue up here, with the stream and all, but it's definitely hotter today.”

Giles, however, was walking toward the hulking great growth of what looked like cane of some kind.

“Ouch!”

And obviously very sharp leaves.

Buffy followed him. “Be careful. Like you said, you don't know what's poisonous, and what's not…like with weird alkaloids and stuff…”

He turned, his eyes narrowed. “Where on earth did you learn about plant alkaloids?”

Colour rose in Buffy's cheeks and she looked more than a little sheepish.

“Let me guess: television again?”

“Um, what's so interesting about this stuff?” She changed the subject.

He turned back to the tall growth. “It's what we needed. Rather like rattan, which will do us nicely for making the walls of a shelter. Cut as many long thin ones as you can, while I work on getting us some heavy ones.”

Buffy eyed the cane. “How many trips is it going to take for you to be satisfied?”

“Hard to say,” he replied, failing to pick up on her less than cheerful tone. “Several, probably. With your Slayer strength, I daresay you'll be able to carry as much as three of me, which will help considerably, but in order to do the job properly we'll need enough for four sides and a roof, not to mention a sleeping platform.”

“Oh…joy,” she muttered, and started cutting.

It took them two days, with mornings devoted to finding food, especially since most of the new fruit was either bitter or in one case, caused a nasty reaction. Giles had been in some pain and had spent the greater part of one morning somewhere far enough downwind of the camp that Buffy couldn't hear his groans or detect the olfactory consequences of playing Russian roulette with alien foods. Fortunately the rash had all but cleared up as well, by the second day.

Their diet, therefore, still consisted pretty much of crabs and plums to fortify themselves for the work ahead, and the greater part of the rest of each day was devoted to the collection of the cane, to bring back enough material to satisfy Giles. On the second morning he'd also stumbled on a waterside stand of saplings on his way to get a drink, a rarity in the old growth forest. They were a type of tree they hadn't seen before, prompting the Watcher to suggest that at some point the creek had probably flooded and brought the seeds or nuts of the saplings down from somewhere much higher up.

Buffy, watching him study the area and the young trees, was beginning to realize that for perhaps the first time since they'd met, Giles was now the one, not her…and that it felt…right.

“You really are good at this stuff, aren't you?”

“What? Not really. Knowledge can be very useful, but if something with very large teeth and claws comes crashing out of this lot in the next ten minutes it won't mean a damned thing, will it?”

She smiled ruefully. “It'll mean I get a chance to do something useful for a change.”

Giles started to cut down one of the saplings. “You're doing fine. Everything would have taken three times as long without your help. Just like this will if you don't come over here and help me cut some of these.”

That night they sensed the beginnings of a change in the weather. The wind had shifted and the air ceased carrying the smell of the ocean on it.

“We are going to start putting the shelter together tomorrow, right?” Buffy asked, stretching stiffness out of her back. Slayer or not, the amount of heavy carrying she'd been doing had taken its toll on muscles and spine. Her seedpods lay discarded. Inside they were almost all woody pith with only tiny cavities. It would take forever to carve out the hard pith and the swords were taking enough of a beating as it was.

Giles looked up from his toiling over the frayed stems they'd brought back earlier. He'd already stripped one entire stem into long, greenish-white stringy bits and was starting on another.

“Absolutely. I hope to have a supply of twine ready by the time we're ready to go to sleep.”

“Twine? How does mutilated plant end up being string?”

He picked up a number of threads and began braiding and twisting them until, when he finally tied it off, he had a couple of feet of, not very pretty, twine, which by the way he was tugging on it to test for strength, wasn't going to break anytime soon.

“I'm impressed.”

“Good.” He picked up a handful of the stripped pieces and handed them to Buffy. “You can help me get finished sometime before daybreak.”

In the end they were finished only a few hours after sundown. They had shifted close to the fire to continue once the last of the light was gone, and didn't stop until Giles pronounced himself happy with the pile they'd amassed.

They were getting settled for the night, now on temporary beds of the leaves they'd brought back to the camp, when the night air was split by a yowling roar that Giles recognised immediately…the hackles rising on his neck and the gooseflesh all over his body attesting to the fact.

It was very close by.

Buffy looked up at her companion, looking for an indication of whether she should be worried or not. One look at Giles' face, even just by firelight, was enough to make her go and pick up the swords and her stakes.

“Are we sleeping or watching tonight?” she asked, when he still hadn't moved moments later.

“What? Oh…you sleep. I'll stand watch tonight. If it's what I think it is, it's a large carnivore…feline…looks rather like an overgrown black leopard…”

Buffy frowned. “Did I miss something?”

“Um yes, actually. You frightened one off when I was down at the stream the other day.”

“That's why…” She scowled. “Why didn't you say something?”

“Apart from feeling rather stupid about facing my mortality in my birthday suit, I didn't want to alarm you any more than this place already does.”

“Funny, I'm not that alarmed anymore. The bugs pretty much keep to themselves except for the bite-y things and those little beetles that run over you if you sit too long in one place, and while I'm pretty much still jonesing for ice cream and a bath with actual soap, and maybe toilet paper and coffee—not necessarily in that order, I'm dealing.”

Their shared almost-smile of civilization withdrawal solidarity stayed with Buffy even when she woke the next morning and found Giles stretched out alongside her, sword close to his hand.

She tickled his nose with a fingertip. “Hey.”

One green eye opened then closed again. “Not moving. Closed for stocktaking,” he mumbled.

“I thought you were on sentry duty…and you were going to call me to take over…remember?”

“Too bloody knackered.”

She half-giggled, half-rolled her eyes. “That's my hero.”

“Not me. You,” he mumbled.

Buffy touched his stubbly cheek, a rush of affection making her want to brush his sunburned forehead with her lips. She refrained, but got up without disturbing him any further.

When he finally stirred, much, much later, Giles thought he was dreaming. He sniffed again. Buffy had a low fire burning and she was crouched over it.

She looked up when she sensed him close to her back. “I thought you'd like something different. Well, not that different…but hey, you didn't have to cook it or catch it…”

The fire had burned down to a bed of red-hot coals on which Buffy had rested a wide, flat flagstone, probably a river stone, the size of a dinner plate but more or less pear shaped. Alongside her were roasted crab shells. On her stone was what looked very much like crab omelette.

“You followed the ducks?”

“Yeah. Mrs. Duck was pretty pissed, but I only took the ones that slooshed when I shook them. The other four were pretty much on their way to becoming more little ducks. Sorry. I was sorta hoping to find something better than crab to put in it…but no corner store.”

“On the contrary,” Giles told her. “This is a marvellous idea…the stone, the eggs…which are quite cooked, by the way.”

“Ooh…um. Oh.” She stopped, stumped. “God, I thought of everything except something to put it on after it's cooked.”

Giles thought for a moment then went over to their piles of building supplies and returned with two clean, but slightly wilted palm-leaves, which weren't much different to banana leaves.

Delighted, Buffy scraped omelette onto both with the razor clam shaped shell she'd been using to tend the eggs on the stone.

They ate in silence, savouring the new taste. The eggs were very rich…probably too rich if they were back in Sunnydale with hen eggs available, but both of them savoured them as though they were filet mignon…or jelly donuts.

Buffy sighed and took his soiled leaf. “We so have to find something other than crab. Another week of this and I'll never be able to face crab, ever again. My turn to wash up.”

Giles smiled crookedly at the highly unoriginal humour. “Be my guest,” he told her, still tired and stiff from the previous few days. He decided that a quiet day and perhaps an increased amount of calories, if they could find something more substantial to eat, would probably solve the problem.

“So where are we going today?”

“Apart from food collection, I think we'll stay in today. We need to rest, and not get too run down. We'll try and at least construct the side panels for the shelter instead.”

It took Giles almost two hours of trial and error to find a way to form a rectangle with his heavy cane, and to secure the joins with his twine with enough strength to stop it from coming apart when he tried to stand it up.

“Wow. A geometric shape,” Buffy announced, returning from a trip to the fruit tree.

“Ha, bloody ha,” he muttered, selecting thinner canes and lashing them to his frame just as tightly.

Some time later Buffy came back from a fruitless search for more duck nests, and wandered over to look at his work. The thin canes were set a few inches apart, right across the frame.

“There's gaps,” she pointed out redundantly.

He looked up at her with *that* look on his face. “Astonishing how you manage to detect these things.”

She handed him a fruit and smiled. “Go, me.”

Giles shook his head and went to his piles of leaves and stems. For the next couple of hours Buffy watched him weave heavy stems and stout leaves in turn, over and under the canes. It wasn't until he'd done the same thing again on the reverse side, to double the thickness, and pronounced the panel finished, that Buffy understood why he was using several different materials.

He hadn't just made a wall for their shelter…a pretty impressive wall, given the 'nothing' they had to build it with…especially the no tools, no nails and no anything part of that nothing…he'd made art out of it. It was a simple design, with diagonal slashes of red and pale gold in a basically green background.

“You've done this before?”

Giles looked up at her, aware of the admiration and surprise in her voice. “Read about it. It's a relatively simple technique. I don't know how long it will stand up to a storm, but the leaves I chose should be water proof enough for a cloudburst or a quiet downpour.”

By the time night fell they'd completed three more panels, Buffy practising her weaving as Giles constructed the other frames. Her design ideas were too grand and ended up looking like extremely demented Picasso, but neither of them cared. Once she'd mastered the weaving part, her work was as strong as his and it was speeding up the building process considerably.

The following day Giles experimented until he found a strong enough way to make the entrance panel, before turning his attention to a design for the roof. He felt if anything, more tired than ever but dismissed it as a concession to his age and the adjustment to their new living conditions.

“I don't want a flat roof if we can help it. The first deluge—and we don't know what kind of weather we might eventually get—and the weight of the water on a flat roof will probably collapse it. Nor do I want to provide a platform for one of our feline friends to park itself on and wait for breakfast to emerge.”

Buffy looked up from weaving around the doorframe. “Good plan. So what are we going to do?”

“I'm not sure, but I think now is the time to construct the basic frame work so that I can better visualize what I have to do. Buffy watched him walk over to the edge of the clearing and put a hand on one of the giant tree trunks. She guessed he was going to have to cut it, and it was pretty clear by his sombre expression that he wasn't happy about the idea.

“Will you have to hurt it much?” She asked quietly.

He hadn't realized that she'd moved up to stand at his elbow. “Not a great deal. It just doesn't seem…right. I will need you, and your sharpest stake, for the next part. We're going to use these two trees to anchor the rear of the shelter, and hopefully prevent it from blowing away during the first real gale that hits us.”

The process of Giles marking out where he wanted the sapling poles to go using a now-battered sword point, followed by Buffy using her Slayer strength to increase the size of the hole, first by driving her stake into it with a rock, then using both hands and a lot of sweat to pull it back out again, was straightforward, but time consuming.

When she was done, Giles could fit the trimmed and cut-to-length pole into the hole she'd made. He watched approvingly as she drove it in with the rock until there was no way he would ever be able to pull it out again. The other tree was simply notched to the same depth, so the pole could slide, with a little bending by Buffy, snugly into place. Giles added a vertical pole, a couple of feet higher than the height of the cross beam, driven into the ground exactly halfway between the two anchor trees. Then he brought his rear panel, lacing it first to the horizontal pole, then to the central pole for added strength. With the 'wall' in place, he began joining lengths of twine to lash the frame of it to the tree trunks as well.

When he finally stood back, looking more tired than ever, Buffy gave it a shake to see how firm it was. She was surprised to find it almost rigid, at least without using Slayer strength on it. It wasn't huge, but she had to stand on tiptoe to look over it.

When Giles went to select the heavy saplings for the opposite corners, Buffy followed and put a hand on his arm.

“Giles, you need to rest. You don't look so good.”

“I'm fine,” he told her and scratched at his rapidly thickening beard. “I'm never going to get this bloody thing finished if I keep gentleman's hours.”

Buffy blew out a frustrated breath. “Then tell me how I can help?”

She 'helped' by driving the two three-inch diameter posts into the ground for Giles, as well as a couple of smaller ones for the doorframe. The foundation saplings were over seven feet long after trimming and stripping, and after digging holes about a foot deep with the sword, he'd asked her to drive them at least another foot into the ground, which, when the holes were filled, meant they were in no danger of moving again, either.

After that she simply fetched and carried, handing him twine and panels and finishing lacings where he directed. By the time the light was starting to fail, they had a pretty impressive enclosure, in Buffy's opinion.

As they sat and ate their fruit that night neither of them mentioned the fact that they still hadn't seen another sentient being, nor had there been any sign of the Scoobies trying to contact them, or rescue them, even though they had now been missing for a week…way too long to have not been missed…they hoped.

The next day Buffy set about really cleaning out the enclosure, smoothing the ground and making certain there were no holes in the earth where nasties of any kind, insect, reptile, or beast, could unexpectedly pop out to surprise them in the night, while Giles worked on the roofing problem. They'd eaten the last of the fruit for breakfast but Giles still looked like hell when they were done. And he still hadn't solved his roofing problem.

When he'd sat contemplating for almost an hour without moving, Buffy went and hunkered down next to him. “What exactly is the problem?”

He made an upside down “V” shape with his hands. “We need this, and we have the rear support in place.” He pointed to the apparently over-sized centre pole supporting the back wall. “But I haven't come up with a strong enough solution for the front support that wont bisect the doorway,” he explained in a flat, tired voice. Buffy sat with him, considering the problem for the next half hour.

“Move the doorway,” she said finally, breaking the silence.

“What?”

“So we have to take one panel off and make another one. Move the doorway right across to the side…we're keeping it small, right? So it's easier to defend? So the doorway's what…a little over a couple of feet wide? I'm guessing the panel is a little wider than I am tall. So we take the old wall off, make a new one with the door on one side, put your central support pole in…and not only do you get the pointy part for the roof, you get something strong to swing an actual door on. Am I good or what?”

Her grin disappeared when she met Giles' eyes. There was a spark of amusement and acknowledgement of her ingenuity in them, but he looked really ill, which explained why he hadn't already solved the relatively simple problem himself. Somehow, in the last few hours he'd gone from looking just plain tired to scarily pale, in spite of the increasing tan. There were dark patches under his eyes and the normally animated green eyes were almost dead.

“Giles, you're sick.”

He shook his head. “I'm just tired.”

“You don't have a mirror. You're scaring me. You look bad; you have no colour. I mean: you make Spike look like the poster boy for healthy living. I'm serious here. It's not like we can drop by the emergency room.”

He was convinced less by her babble than by the fear in her voice. He nodded very slowly.

“I don't know what it is. I've eaten nothing you haven't shared, except that last new fruit, so I don't believe I've been poisoned. We've checked each other for bites every morning and there's been nothing other than the same pest which has been biting you.”

“Maybe you're getting allergic to something and I'm not?” She knew she was floundering, but she was more than a little frightened. “Or we could have missed a bite…something that didn't make a lump or a rash?”

“Perhaps. If I had some welts or a rash I might suspect contact poisoning from some of the materials we've used for the huts, but…” He stopped when Buffy lay a cool palm on his brow. It felt so, very, very good…

Alarm coloured her cheeks. “Giles, you're burning up! All I know for fever is aspirin-slash-doctor soonest. What did they do before aspirin?”

“Waited it out, I'm afraid.” He took her hand reassuringly in his. “If it gets worse, build a fire and keep me close to it, but if the fever gets too high, you'll need to bathe…” He took a moment to deal with that. “You'll need to bathe me to reduce the fever...but you mustn't let me chill, either. If it doesn't kill me first, the fever will eventually burn out the virus, or the infection, if we're lucky…but if I chill and can neither fight this infection nor any other opportunistic one that happens by while I'm weakened, I will die.”