The scalding pot of fine Ceylon tea was surprisingly well brewed and Giles savoured it slowly, happy that the little caf? had booths and less intrusive lighting than the main part of the mall. His head was hurting. Visions of a small girl turning purple with rage when her mother refused go back to the toy department to buy whatever it was that she wanted, then making enough noise to wake the dead, made him scowl even more. It seemed to be a day for hapless parents to take screaming, spoiled little monsters out to inflict them on an unsuspecting public...

The peace of the last twenty minutes or so, along with the tea and a rather nice approximation of scones with strawberry jam and *real* cream, had put him in much better spirits and allowed him to contemplate what he was going to do next. He'd been so intent on getting out of Sears and away from the vociferous tantrums of the small girl, who'd made Bysarian Shrieker demons sound like Irish tenors by comparison, that he'd paid for the soft blue jeans he'd picked up from the sale table and made a swift exit. They sat in their plastic shopping bag next to the equally soft, quality white t-shirts from J C Penney. He'd enjoyed the relative quiet there until a young couple arrived with a pram and another set of impossibly loud lungs, and proceeded to ignore it while they bickered about what brand of underwear the husband would or would not wear.

He ran a hand over his face and decided apocalypses were far preferable to malls.

On his way back to J C Penney's to buy a comfortable shirt, he stopped at an L.L. Bean shopfront to eye the display of beautifully cut Oxford shirts. Somehow, much as a part of him would have liked to go in and buy the attractive French blue one that would have done quite nicely even with the fairly ordinary generic jeans he'd already bought, something stopped him. He wasn't even quite conscious of why, or what...except that it had to do with the question of whether there was any point since he'd been more or less invisible for what seemed like forever, anyway. Instead he went to K-mart and bought a couple of plain blue polo shirts before heading wearily to the exit and the motel.

The room was deserted when he let himself back in. Thankfully the pizza banquet appeared to have been held elsewhere, possibly in Dawn and Buffy's room. He took the chance to divest himself of the old clothes and cheerfully cram the polyester pants into the waste paper basket by the bed before indulging in a long and blissful, if still ill advised, scratch of almost his entire array of weals and bites.

In the process, he padded to the bathroom and closed the door, pausing to study himself in the full-length mirror on the back of it. Exertion had made the weals stand out nastily, despite some residual smears of the calamine lotion over them. His salty perspiration had despatched most of it, and hadn't helped the irritation any more than the hot Nevada weather had helped his disposition. One thing was certain, he sighed. He was no boy any more...despite satisfactory weight and fitness. The inevitable march of gravity was beginning to exact a toll. He'd taken so little interest in himself for so long that he was a little surprised by the changes...unaware that to the outsider he was still fitter and better put together than most men ten years younger. In the end he shook his head quietly and went to shower. He would have preferred not to spoil Buffy's good work, but the heat, even so late into the evening, had put paid to that ambition. The shower, set to coolish, was so good...and so soothing on his bites, that he allowed himself the indulgence of prolonging it for several more minutes.

Even so, by the time he'd dried himself and padded out to find clean boxers, he'd started to itch again. He put on his old boxers and one of the thin t-shirts Xander had purchased, after adding calamine to every spot he could reach. When he was reasonably confident the stuff had dried on his skin, he crawled into bed.

The events of recent days and the pressure of the responsibility incumbent upon him for the future of all slayers, was beginning to impact heavily, combined as they were with the worry about Buffy, Dawn, Willow and Xander's immediate futures and long term plans and the not-quite-so subliminal grief he still carried for the demise of the institution which had for so long formed such a major part of his identity... For all its flaws it still represented so much to him personally: his grandmother, his father...his family friends...honorary relatives...and colleagues...so many of them bound up in its history...so many of them still unaccounted for...or known to have perished...

When Giles stirred not too long after dawn the next morning, Andrew was fast asleep, snoring comically, and Xander was nowhere to be seen. He quietly dressed in his new clothes, aware of two things. It was getting towards the time to gather up the group and press on to Cleveland, and he was homesick...not for England... but for a world that included Anya and Tara, Xander's eye and Sunnydale with all of its flaws; trivia like the Magic Box, and all of the familiar and well-worn volumes he'd lost; well trodden patrol routes; various townspeople with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, either from his days of early morning jogging, or as fellow vendors in the small business district. He wondered what had happened to the standard poodle that lay in wait daily for him to jog past its gate, or the old lady who used to arrange the flowers in the fresh displays outside the florist. He wondered how Dawn would hold up once it began to sink in that in all likelihood she would not see any of her teachers, her classmates or her friends again...

Outside, he wasn't surprised to see Xander sitting, leaning forward, elbows on knees, head down, on the single park bench plonked in the middle of the courtyard, a trash can on one side, a large concrete planter with straggly daisy bush, on the other.

He walked across and sat down quietly alongside him.

"Enjoy your pizza last night?"

"I think it gave me nightmares," Xander replied without looking up. "I miss her, Giles."

Giles put a hand on the younger man's broad shoulder.

They sat in silence for a long time, before Giles finally broke the silence. "I think breakfast is in order. I remember once, a few years back, Willow mentioning how much you like Denny's...something about a triple breakfast special that rather appealed to your vast appetite," he said dryly, but with affection evident in both his voice and the light in his eyes. "I saw an advertisement for one on a billboard in the Mall. It's only two streets further over. Fancy a brisk morning constitutional and some breakfast?"

Xander looked up and grinned slowly, his own eye growing bright with affection. "Sounds like a plan I could live with: a meal with no flock of cackling females and best of all: no Andrew..."

Giles chuckled and nodded. He couldn't have summed it up better himself.

There were no triple offers current at Denny's but Xander had already set his ambitions on a placard proclaiming 'two stacks of hotcakes for the price of one' with butter and whipped cream to go with the ubiquitous bottle of maple syrup on the table next to the ketchup, barbeque sauce and mustard. The place was still fairly empty, though, Giles suspected, probably not for long.

In the end he settled for Lipton's tea, the oatmeal deluxe and an English muffin. Xander, on the other hand, luxuriated in his menu for some time before settling on an All-American slam to go with his hotcakes. Giles, who normally avoided American fast food outlets like the plague, couldn't believe that the plate was for only one person: three eggs scrambled with cheddar cheese, hashed browns, two strips of bacon, two sausage links and a in Xander's case, a bagel. There didn't seem to be any possible way the young man would be able to deal with the stacks of hotcakes when they were delivered to the table...

They ate in companionable silence, Giles taking his time and savouring his surprisingly pleasant meal, while Xander wolfed through his plate, explaining with a crooked smile, his dislike of cold food. On his second cup of tea, Giles watched Xander's eyes light up as the hotcakes were placed in front of him, before he upended the bottle of maple syrup, wholesale, over the lot.

"How is everyone coping?" He asked when Xander finally sat back, stretching his midriff and sipping at a fresh cup of coffee.

He seemed almost to have expected the question. "Pretty good, all things considered. Dawnie pretty much had a blast last night. They found a music video channel on the TV in their room, so it turned into a pizza dance party," he explained, amused. "Yeah, I think they're all gonna be fine...eventually."

Giles raised an eyebrow.

"Dawn told me she's started having nightmares about her mother again...same as after...you know. And she told me Buffy doesn't sleep much. Apparently she makes all the right noises, goes to bed and everything, but Dawn hears her get up a little while later. She says sometimes she hears pages turning, sometimes muffled crying from the bathroom and sometimes she hears her slip out and doesn't hear her come back in til daylight. Willow...she's dealing, but she's scared of what's ahead of her. At least she has Kennedy...they're pretty strong together. I...I think she'll..." His head dropped and he swallowed hard, several times.

Giles' hand returned to his shoulder and squeezed comfortingly. "I know, " he said softly. "It's going to take time, but it will get better, I promise. I miss her too."

Xander cleared his throat, and sat up, half smiled, trying to ignore the moisture in the brown eye and the green ones looking at him with such compassion.

"So...what's for dessert?"

Xander groaned again as they made their way along the main street. "Man, I knew the waffles were a mistake."

"The *waffles*? Most mere mortals would have been in dire trouble after the first stack of pancakes!"

The next moan was even more expressive than the previous one. "I think I may even barf," he complained.

Giles' nose pinched. "Not anywhere near me, thank you very much. I've only just got these clothes. They're comfortable and I don't intend to spend another day either in a department store or a Laundromat for some time, if I can humanly void it."

"No problem," Xander agreed greenly. "There are plenty of perfectly good gutters I can decorate."

"As long as you neither decorate my clothes nor our room when we get back. If you do only one person will be cleaning it up."

"Fine, whatever," Xander muttered, sidestepping an oncoming pram only to walk full tilt into a trestle supporting one end of a plank. He didn't have time to look up before the occupant of the plank fell on him, followed by a yell of both rage and dismay from Giles. When he finally did, the sign painter was scrambling to his feet, torn between sheer temper at Xander and actual fear of the Watcher whose fearsome expression looked positively homicidal, in between the globs of fluorescent green paint.

The painter sucked it up, outrage outweighing fear. "Do you know how much that stuff costs? You better be going to pay for this or I'm gonna call the cops!"

Giles advanced several steps, convincing the smaller man, who'd picked himself up off the sidewalk and dusted himself off, to back pedal furiously. The Watcher spread his arms wide, encompassing his thoroughly spoiled clothes.

"I'd say we were even, wouldn't you?" He suggested dangerously.

Across the street, in the doorway of a liquor store, Ethan Rayne watched the tall, quite obviously fuming, figure with iridescent lime green paint in globs and streams from hair to shoes, with a smirk.

"The beauty of chaos," he said smugly, "is that not only will you learn from it eventually, old son, but in the meantime even I get to be entertained by the direction it takes..." The smirk stretched into an amused grin and then, for the first time in a long time, Ethan started to laugh.

Xander tensed, took a deep breath and started to open his mouth, but Giles frowned at him and shook his head tightly. He couldn't actually take hold of Xander's arm without risking transferring some of the paint, so he had to rely on whatever tenuous moral authority he had to persuade him to leave the situation be and come back to the motel.

After a beat, Xander, glaring mutinously, first at Giles himself, then at the bent back of the sign painter picking up brush and pot from where they'd fallen into the gutter, consciously lowered his hunched shoulders, let out a breath and followed Giles' lead.

Once they were a little way down the street, Giles could hear his companion muttering:

"Cause, yeah, of *course* the optic nerve's connected to the brain, and half my brain must have dropped out through the damn hole while I was in the hospital."

Giles hesitated, unsure whether anything he might say would be at all helpful.

"Okay, maybe it's just as well I didn't start a fight. Thanks, Giles. I'd have got my ass whupped anyhow. Probably couldn't even land a punch straight." His tone wasn't nearly as resigned as his words.

"Yet, here you are," remarked Giles gently, taking Xander's blind side without comment, to watch out for traffic as they crossed the street, then moving back to the side he could see from. "Still alive after Armageddon."

Xander shook his head angrily.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it: count your blessings, things could be worse, you still have your other eye, yadda, yadda, yadda. Not one of you has an idea in *hell* what it's like, so save the sermon, would ya?" He quickened his pace and strode ahead until they reached the motel, where he threw himself into one of the armchairs in the lobby. Giles approached slowly, crouched down until he could look in Xander's face, and waited until he had his attention.

"That wasn't what I meant, Xander."

"Wasn't it?" The young man was clearly unconvinced.

"You survived the battle; therefore you *can* still fight, you are still...part of the team. You could put your survival down to sheer good fortune if you wished, but I'd say that's most unlikely. No, I have no idea what it's like for you, and I'm sorry for that. I'm not, however, going to spend a lot of time being sorry for *you*, because, unless you say otherwise, it's probably neither what you need nor what you want. Anything practical or...anything I can do, anything at all, you only have to ask; I hope you know that."

The corner of Xander's mouth turned up and he cast his eye up and down Giles' still-bespattered form.

"Well, much as I'd like my own personal glow-in-the-dark beacon for night vision..."

Giles abruptly remembered the state he was in and stood up, looking around him as he tried to think how he would begin to get clean again.

"Jeez, Giles, it's like someone put a jinx on you," Xander joked. He snickered, then froze at the exact same time that Giles himself did. They stared at each other for a moment.

"Magick?"

"Could be."

"I need to speak to..."

"Willow."

She wasn't watching the mass slayer workout, which now encompassed all the girls, accelerated healing having restored most of them to full fitness and the rest fast catching up. Kennedy and Buffy were demonstrating hand-to-hand techniques against opponents with varying strengths and weaknesses to accommodate everyone. Dawn was also absent this time.

Willow wasn't in her room, nor, as far as he could see, in any of the communal rooms. In the meantime, Giles was conscious that the green paint was rapidly drying on his skin and in his hair, as well as on his clothes. He decided to throw himself on the mercy of Mrs Pottschalk.

"Well now, what *has* happened to you, Mister Giles? Please tell me you haven't been sitting on any of my furniture in that condition?" She was obviously sympathetic, but she had a living to make, after all.

"No, no," Giles reassured her. "I've done my best to avoid touching anything, and I wiped my feet off outside. So far as I can see, it's only me who's in need of renovation." He smiled at her sheepishly and was slightly alarmed to see her visibly melt.

"Well now, don't you worry, sugar, we'll have you all fixed in two shakes of a rattler's tail." She scuttled into the back office, from where sounds of thorough rummaging and tutting emerged as she searched for, but failed to find, what she was looking for. She returned to the front desk clutching an aged metal container and wearing a disappointed expression.

"This is all I have, but it's a mite caustic. I'm not sure if you should use it, seeing as how you're real fair-skinned and all." She peered at the small print on the tin and shook her head. "No, I don't think this will do at all. You know, there's a hardware store at the mall. Mister Pottschalk gets all his supplies there; just say Camellia sent you. That's me," she explained with an expectant air.

Giles remembered his manners "That's, um, a charming name, Mrs Pottschalk. Your family are, um, keen gardeners?"

"Well now, so they are. Do you garden, Mister Giles? Or may I call you Rupert - what a *wonderful* old fashioned English name *that* is, to be sure..." She put the paint remover down and beamed mistily at him. Giles' discomfort went up a notch.

"Only back home, I'm afraid. I have, um, a busy life over here, with all these, um, students to look after. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and see about inding a way of drawing less, um, attention to myself."

He beat a hasty retreat, and was girding his loins for another foray into retail hell, when he met Willow and Dawn coming in through the front doors.

"Giles! What on earth happened?" Willow asked, eyes wide. Dawn put a hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook with the effort of holding in her mirth.

"I joined a colony of experimental artists," he quipped acidly.

Willow was about to make a witty reply, looked at his expression and changed her mind, settling instead for a sensible 'sympathy face' and waiting for his explanation.

"I had an accident, Willow. Again. I'm beginning to suspect that more than natural mischance is at work."

"Magicks?"

"She didn't do it. Nobody saw her do it. You can't prove anything," Dawn put in between strangled giggles. Giles glared at her and continued:

"Not that I in any way suspect you, Willow. I merely thought that you were the logical person to consult to help me find out if I *am* under some kind of supernatural influence or attack, and why. I just hope no-one else is in danger."

"Sure, I'd be glad to help. You wanna get cleaned up first?"

It looked as if it was the mall after all. Giles had started to walk past them to the door, when Willow stopped him. "Look, Giles, I don't want to slip back into bad old 'magick as convenience store' Willow, but I don't see any harm in helping you out on this one. What with the ant bites, you don't want to risk anything more on your skin until it's had a chance to heal."

So saying, she beckoned him down the corridor to the deserted breakfast room, Dawn trailing behind them out of curiosity. Once they were behind closed doors, and checked that none of the staff were around to witness the spell and ask awkward questions, Willow chanted a few phrases and made some signs in the air. She waited a couple of seconds, repeated part of her incantation, and then frowned.

"It's not..."

Giles started suddenly and looked down at himself as the gobs of paint began to disappear from his hands. He could feel the magick working likewise through his hair and on all the exposed skin.

"I believe it did," he told her gratefully, but she shook her head, pointing at his jeans and polo shirt.

"See, your clothes are still painty. It only worked on what was on you personally, and I meant to get rid of all of it, but...something stopped me."

"It wasn't strictly necessary to clean my garments; are you sure your spell didn't just self-limit?"

Willow contrived to look slightly affronted. "Sure I'm sure. All the paint should have been consigned to the rainbow dimension, where all colours exist in perfect harmony. It's their natural plane of existence; sorta like...repatriation. No, this was interference."

"Someone impounded its passport," suggested Dawn with a grin. Two sets of green eyes rolled at her in concert, and she sighed. "Whatever. No one appreciates it when you extend a metaphor. Especially when you're funnier."

"Did you get any sense of intelligence, of purpose?" Giles asked Willow. "Or was it merely background 'static'? The day after we got here, do you remember: you tried to work magick, and at first it was unsuccessful. Do you think there could be a connection?"

Willow considered for a few moments. "I'm really not sure. I'd need to do a proper locator or focal point spell to be certain, and I don't know if I can get all the ingredients for it around here. I might need to catch a bus to Vegas. You know Mister Paulsen, he used to supply the Magic Box sometimes. He could help me."

"I realise it's a long journey for the sake of a simple spell, but although so far only I've been affected, and I've not come to serious harm, there's no telling where it might all end. I'd be grateful if you could see your way to doing it, Willow."

"Can I go? I've never been to Vegas. We could work the tables while we're there: swell the slayer coffers by counting cards and reading people's minds." Dawn shrugged at their horrified expressions. "Just kidding," she assured them hurriedly. "Can I still go? I am *so* bored hanging around just watching other people do stuff. It's like school."

Willow was about to capitulate, when Giles stepped in.

"I'm sure I can find something interesting and worthwhile for you to do, Dawn. Just have patience while I go and find some replacement clothes, then I'll meet you in the lobby after lunch. Tell all the other girls to be there, too. And make it a light lunch, hmm?"

There was the hint of a twinkle in his eye, and Dawn was intrigued. "Okay. Better be more fun than Caesar's Palace, though."

Giles smiled. "As to that, I couldn't say. But I think you'll enjoy it. I believe I shall, as well."