Dawn arrived in a blood red bath of warm light. Giles opened his eyes and sighed. He was still there. The pleasant dream, in which he was in his own flat, admittedly yelling at Spike to leave Buffy alone, but still blessedly home, was just that. A dream.

He crawled out of the lean-to with its crudely woven leaf-roof and squinted at the horizon. So early…again. He didn't seem to be able to sleep past sunrise in this sodding world. If it wasn't the light from the huge sodding red sun, it was the roaring of whatever lived deep in the forest or the incessant morning cacophony of the bird-life greeting the dawn, or each other, or something…

The walk down to the stream took ten minutes. It had taken ten minutes each morning and evening since he'd arrived, almost without variation. It might not have been so bad, if his expanding square search of the place had revealed anything but more forest, more strange birds and creatures and an utter lack of any evidence of civilization. There had been neither plane, nor distant sounds, nor even a discarded wrapper or bottle cap to hint at the presence of sentient life. Not only that but not one of the creatures or plants he'd so far encountered were recognizable from any of his books.

He washed slowly, since he had nowhere to be, and knew that apart from widening his search until the sun grew too hot and the forest too humid, that there wasn't likely to be anything to do.

This was still the best time of day. There was already a sting in the sun's rays, but the air was cool and the water cold, clear and sweet. He threw some over his hair and rubbed his scalp before straightening again. His shirt hung open where the buttons had been ripped off by the demon he'd almost, but not quite, subdued before it knocked him cold, and his jeans were torn in one knee and filthy dirty. He'd washed his underwear a number of times, willing to go commando while waiting for them to dry in the interminably humid air of the forest, but hadn't been able to bring himself to do the reverse. Denim would take forever to dry anyway, and he didn't fancy meeting his always-possible demise in boxer shorts.

Bloody creature could have at least taken him prisoner or something, instead of just abandoning him in this forsaken place when the portal opened again, while they were fighting.

The last thing Giles could remember was seeing it begin to open. After that there was blackness, and then waking with a smashing headache and a veritable herd of tiny livestock crawling over his body as he lay in the rotting leaves and assorted plant matter on the forest floor.

It had taken three days for the weals from the bites to go down, but at least he hadn't been poisoned or developed any infections. And in all the time since then there had been no sign of another portal or another living being.

As he squinted up at the rising sun, his stomach rumbled. His glasses had vanished during the fight, not to be found again no matter how hard he'd looked in the deep carpet of humus and leaves where they had grappled. He supposed he would have to find himself some breakfast. Eating was a kind of Russian roulette, with no way to know what fruits or nut-like seeds were going to be edible or toxic to Humans. He'd found one new, palatable looking food each day since he'd arrived, but he'd only had the courage to test three beyond the basic sniff, scratch, lick test. He hadn't dropped dead yet, but the second one, rather like a purplish-blue plum, had given him a right old bellyache for hours and other…consequences…for most of the next day.

Today he would try the grain-sized grass seed he'd found in one of the clearings. It looked nothing like wheat or barley…probably more like miniature maize, except the cobs were white, tiny and the grain hard rather than soft and sweet. He pottered in the stream for another hour looking for suitable stones to grind with before heading off to collect enough of the seed heads to try an experiment.

When he'd finished his practise grind next to the stream, he was less than impressed with the results. Instead of fine white flour he had a flat river stone covered in crumbled seed, half-crushed stalks and the little flour-like substance he'd been able to produce had been severely reduced by the zephyr that had blown up while he was working, to flick most of it off in a mischievous puff of wind.

With a sigh he shifted until his back was to the wind, used a sharp pointed stick to scrape as many grains from the rest of the cigar thin, cob-like stalks onto his stone, until he had a big enough pile for his purposes. Soon he had a small pile of very sad looking flour, but at least this time it did look like rather crumbly flour, or meal, more or less. The next step was to mix it with a little water and to form what he optimistically hoped would be a kind of dough.

It worked, more or less. The smell made him hungry. Not quite something from home, but good after the relative carbohydrate starvation…as long as it didn't kill him. It took some time to make a small fire with the cigarette lighter he always carried. A former smoker, he'd never got out of the habit of having it in his pocket and it had stood him in good stead many times over the years…

The next problem was how to cook his small loaf. There was the possibility that the fumes from the material he was burning could just as equally poison him or the food, but he was using the same material with which he'd cooked the first thing he tried…a handful of small, flat, white mussel-like molluscs from the creek. He hadn't been ill, or perished from that experience, so with luck he would survive this too. In the end he opted for waiting for hot coals to accumulate enough to scrape out a hole in them with a stick and bury the loaf in them. Not the most palatable option, but tried and true.

The aroma soon became mouth-watering. It almost smelled like bread. Almost. More perhaps like buckwheat pancakes intermixed with the smell of toasted-to-the-point-of-singeing sesame seed. Still, it was heavenly after days and days of either the bland shellfish or the other fruit he'd found, which could, with a little imagination, perhaps be called a poor man's passionfruit, despite the lime green colour of its equally tough shell. The pulp inside, when scraped out, had proved sweet and rich and enjoyable, but after days without starch, nothing filled him or stuck to his rather despairing insides.

His plan had been to have a couple of bites of his bread, and then wait to see what effect it might have on him, thus lessening the chance of fatal poisoning and at the same time hoarding the treat. By the time he'd finished the second mouthful, however, he was lost, consuming the whole dinner roll-sized flat loaf in moments. As cinder-encrusted and dry as it was, as different as the nutty, almost sesame flavour was, it seemed like the most wonderful thing he'd ever tasted as he devoured it.

Giles was still thinking about his breakfast an hour later as he reached one of his many perimeter markers, telling him exactly how far out he'd extended his search the previous day. Starting at it, he paced out approximately another ten metres and blazed a rough mark in the smooth trunk of a large, twisted tree, or what passed for one in his strange, fairytale forest, using a sharp stick, before setting off to see whether the day would bring anything new, or just more of the same.

By sunset he knew. All he had accomplished was to explore another thirty-foot wide corridor of forest around his campsite and expose himself far too much to the sun and heat. He hadn't even discovered anything new to eat or drink, or to look at. Just the same flowers, the same birds, the same rocks, and pretty much the same everything else, including another bloody no-show on the portal front.

The only thing he made sure to do was to pick another shirt-full of seed to mill. The shirt made a far better collection basket and when he returned, a few huge, flat green leaves from one of the forest palms twisted into a cone, made a fine, if temporary, storage device, wedged between two rocks and slightly off the ground, even though the slightly bruised parts gave off a faint aroma that reminded him of lemon.

If he were alive in the morning, he would have another filling breakfast and perhaps even convince himself to go stumbling around in the mud again looking for more of those shellfish for his lunch. He was tired of being hungry all the time, tired of the bites and scratches, the itching and the not being clean. His scalp felt like it had two inches of dirt on it despite his morning washes, his beard was beginning to itch, and he wasn't used to stinking quite so abominably. It irritated him that he felt such things quite so acutely. It wasn't terribly macho or manly.

He sighed. Of course neither was the overwhelming need to see her face again…

He would just have to pull himself together. It wasn't like he'd been there for years, nor he hoped, was he likely to be. He had no desire to play Robinson bloody Crusoe in a lost demon dimension for the rest of his life.

He went to sleep in the nest he had made himself as the red-gold glow of the forest slipped into a pale blue-blackness, made eerie by the strange geometry of shadows created by the light of two moons.

In the morning he ground seed and cooked and ate his bread, but he didn't go back to the stream to wash and he didn't extend his search. Instead he stayed in camp and brooded. On his way back from his evening drink, he decided that there was something to be said for brooding as an exercise in dealing, or not dealing, with things, and that Angel might actually have had something.

The mood lasted until mid morning the following day, when hunger and thirst outweighed self-pity and he set off to visit the stream before finding something halfway decent to fill his stomach.

He was halfway through expanding his exploration of the area by another thirty metres when he encountered his first real carnivore.

The creature's eyes glittered like pale emerald gems, sending a shiver down his spine as they studied him lazily. For a few moments he contemplated sentience behind that seemingly arrogant expression, then dismissed the idea. It was summing up its options, no more, no less.

Giles summed up his. Tree climbing had never been a particular forte of his and neither had sprinting.

"Hello," he said finally.

It blinked.

"You are a fine looking chap. You'd give your Earthly cousins a run for their money with that magnificent coat…"

It blew out an impatient breath, mesmerized by the temerity of its prey.

Giles swallowed. The giant cat was red-gold, with pale lemon flecking and a black mask around its eyes and down its elegant nose. Its ears were tufted and tiny on its jaguar-like head, and its tail long and expressive, with its almost constant movement.

It made a guttural sound that made Giles jump in adrenaline-fed fright, then took a couple of steps forward, muscles rippling under the tiger-sized hide.

"You don't want to eat me," Giles continued, knowing that his verbalisations and failure to take flight were confusing the creature. "I'm all sinew and gristle. Yes, tough and wiry and probably quite tasteless, given that I've barely eaten for the last couple of weeks," he babbled.

It snorted again, obviously growing impatient, and provoked by what Giles guessed was the very strong smell both of his fear, and his relatively unwashed person. Washing in mountain streams was all very well, but in terms of body odour, accomplished very little without accompanying soap or shampoo, or clean laundry for that matter…

His heart was thumping in his chest and the adrenaline was pumping so hard his fingertips actually pricked with physical pain. Only his intellect kept him from turning and running for his life.

Finally, just as the animal's body began to crouch, ready to spring, he launched himself at it, waving his arms and unleashing a blood-curdling cry. His scream was the scream of the mortally terrified, repeated over and over as he rushed towards what he firmly believed was going to be his doom, a flailing missile of rage, terror, and unexpected aggression.

Unprepared and startled, the creature cringed for a moment, then roared before leaping in a magnificent arc through the air, at right angles to his seemingly insane assailant, and disappearing into the bowels of the forest.

Giles collapsed on the forest floor, weak from the aftermath of his terror and the subsiding adrenaline, and feeling every absent calorie from the past couple of weeks. When he stopped shaking he pulled himself to his feet again. For all the demons, vampires and evil he had faced, none had ever been as terrifying or inspired such an incredibly primal response as the magnificent feline regarding him much like a tiger contemplating lunch.

There was a temptation to retreat back to his base camp, but he resisted it, pushing on, a little more briskly it had to be said, searching for food, signs of sentient life or of the portal itself. He wanted also to find a new water source, so that he could move camp and push into a new area without the need to track back so far each evening. The expanding square search was a legitimate, proven device, oft used by the military. It was, however, painfully slow, and his patience was finally showing signs of fraying, exacerbated by hunger, solitude and the lack of any tangible progress.

He didn't find any more streams or pools but he did stumble across a palm he hadn't seen before, loaded with what looked a lot like ripe, translucent dates. His shirt, which had more or less become his swag, was already filled with more seed heads and quite ruined, so he resorted to stripping one of the great palm leaves and curling it into another cone shape.

Armed with his prizes, he continued, absently identifying and in some cases, giving names to a number of plant species, trees and insects he'd seen almost every day since his arrival. By the time he returned to his camp, he was carrying not only the dates and seeds, but a bundle of long stems with which to make string, several wide, flat leaves to use as plates, and a beautiful pink flower he'd picked from a vine loaded with them.

Once he'd set them all down by his fire-pit, and decorated the lean-to with the flower, he drew his greatest prize from his jeans pocket. The large, wedge-shaped piece of flint-like stone had a natural edge and meant the difference between cutting the stems and going without them. He made it his first job to sit down with one of his grinding stones and very slowly chip the sharp edge of his new tool until it was as fine as he could make it.

The finished product was crude and probably wouldn't even have passed a boy scout's field test, he decided ruefully, but it would be invaluable, nevertheless, for use in even the simplest of those tasks that were beyond his bare hands.

The string making passed the time, crushing and splitting the stems and separating the fibre strands to braid later, the kind of mindless task that ate up the hours. By morning he had his first, simple length of twine. Once again it wasn't pretty, but it was strong and infinitely useful.

He chose not to go out again, since the weather had closed in and rain seemed the most probable result. He had also survived grazing on the dates on his way back the day before, and was pleased to add them to his small inventory of non-toxic edible plant matter.

After he had made more bread, more string and tried roasting some of the dates on stick, a relative failure, since without sugar they were so tart when heated they almost left his mouth in a permanent pucker, he decided that he was overdue for a bath. There was also the unfulfilled need to find something to carry and store water in. The forest wasn't exactly brimming with analogues to gourds or any other kind of plant that could be hollowed out to provide vessels. Not only that but his limited knowledge of the flora meant the very real possibility of tainting the water with anything he did use.

The stream was less inviting without the dapple of the sun on it. He stopped at the edge and popped one of several dates in his hand into his mouth. The normally clear water seemed inky and dark in the dull light of the overcast day. On previous occasions he'd explored it for more than five miles in each direction, as near as he could guess, without finding any sign of sentient life or any significantly better places to camp. In fact upstream it became vastly less hospitable, cut much deeper into the ground, with high banks, overgrowths of reeds and in some cases vast brambles, making it hard to even get to the water's edge. Downstream was more accessible, but unremarkable.

He reached the butt end of the date and screwed up his face. The first bitter one he'd eaten. He spat it into his hand, pit and all, and threw it into the water, only to jump back when something seemed to lunge from under the overhang of the opposite bank. It broke the surface in a flash of silver before taking the floating date, with its pit still embedded.

Intrigued, he moved closer to the water and broke up another date. By the time he'd pitched four pieces to the same area, he had seen enough to know that it was definitely some kind of fish and that the silver was a reflection off some glorious scales.

The very thought of grilled fish made his mouth water, but his expression grew rueful as he again reflected on the reality that he was no frontiersman, nor likely to give the Swiss Family Robinson any competition in the improvisation stakes.

Still musing about ways to catch the monster, Giles took off his clothes, uncaring now, in his depression, about squatting naked by the creek to wash them out. For a brief moment he considered the presence of the stream's newly discovered inhabitant, and then decided that if it hadn't already attacked him while he was wallowing around looking for stones and then mussels, it wasn't likely to now.

He alternated between rubbing his shorts and shirt and beating them on the large volcanic rock he'd set at the water's edge for the purpose until he was satisfied he'd done all he could in the name of hygiene, without resources. Sick of stinking, he was now even washing the jeans, which were almost done when a final bash on the rock tore loose the ripped leg.

He swore when he realised it was still attached only by the most meagre strands of fabric. Back at the camp, boxers hanging by the fire, he used his new tool to finish removing the leg and to hack off the other one, leaving him with denim cut-offs instead of trousers. The spare fabric from the legs was not wasted. With the ripped ends tied with pieces of his new string, they became small denim sacks for carrying food.

He surveyed his collection of supplies and usefuls and looked at the sky again. His lean-to wasn't going to be much protection against the rain, despite his best efforts to emulate designs from every documentary he'd ever seen about primitive rainforest peoples.

With his half-dry boxers back on, he organised the camp as best he could, ready for any downpour. He even rigged a small lean-to over his fire, which he'd banked with fuel,

hoping it might survive the rain, so as to save the fuel in his lighter. The palm leaves used to make the small canopy gave off a citrus-like aroma as they heated up, despite the distance he'd set them above ground from the pit.

When it came, it came hard. Giles sat under his reinforced lean-to, experimenting with his collection of string, fibres and stems and trying to ignore the inevitable drips. Within a few hours it had become obvious that his twine was never going to have the breaking strain to make a useful fishing line, despite its inherent strength when he platted the long threads together. The same went for half-executed plans for nets or fish traps to catch the great brute beneath the overhanging bank. The experimental fish trap he'd tried to make would, however, come in handy for hanging to store fruits or vegetables in.

Eventually he gave up and lay back, trying to come up with a different plan but his mind had other ideas, drifting back to Sunnydale and his old flat, the aroma of tea and warmed up blueberry muffins, a hot shower, a soft bed…

He sighed and wondered why he hadn't thought of his new flat in Bath. It was everything the tiny apartment was not, and yet the small Sunnydale flat continued to be the only real place his heart called home.

The faces of the others floated in his thoughts. He wondered how Xander and Anya were handling their new life together, if Willow and Tara would survive Willow's changing nature and values, and whether or not Dawn had settled down to school. He closed his eyes, oblivious of the clamping down of his mouth as he finally thought about Buffy. No matter what any of them had said, he had indeed followed his Watcher's training to its horrible conclusion, just like his father before him, and untold Watchers before that…

All of them eventually allowed a young girl to go to her death to save the world, unable to do a damn thing to shield or protect her and, in his case at least, never once able to tell her how he truly felt…

He closed his eyes tighter. She had been his whole life for five long years and in all that time he'd never once allowed himself or his heart, to be revealed to her. He'd always appreciated the irony that his Slayer's nature was so very like his own, that Buffy was no more capable of articulating her feelings than he. It made it that much easier for him to withhold his from her. It also made it infinitely more painful when a word or a smile, or the smallest acknowledgement from her might have meant the difference between taking, or not taking, that first drink last year…

Soon his mind was wandering back, as all minds were wont to do in idleness or in that place between waking and dreams, to all the most painful moments, reliving them, reviewing them, until he felt so wretched that he deliberately tried to focus his mind on the huge feline predator he'd encountered earlier in the day.

It worked for a few minutes, until, suddenly, he was thinking about Buffy again, and their last conversation before she died. He remembered what they'd said to each other word for word, even to the shouting. And he remembered that she hadn't answered when he observed that she must hate him. There had been so much pain between them that day; so much…and they hadn't spoken of it, even after her return, and his.

The rain started to ease and he shifted a little, uncomfortable about where his thoughts had gone from there. Vivid in his mind were her wide, beautiful eyes, the way they picked up the colours around her, shifting from soft grey, to blue, to the softest grey-green depending on her mood, and the tender, full lips, soft skin and even softer hair, the feel of her body as he had held her that day, feeling for the first time, the full unspoken strength of her need of him. Even if she had almost crushed every rib in his body…

He cleared his throat and shifted again. He'd known since Angel had left her that his feelings for her had changed into something much more difficult to hide. Known and buried them. He wasn't sure why they had surfaced right now.

She was young and beautiful and deserved the freedom and passion of youth, even with Riley, if he had truly been her choice. He had even come close to liking the lad, an infinite improvement over vampires and opportunistic louts like young Abrams. He'd certainly come close…but had never quite conquered the lurking jealousy that watching the commando with Buffy engendered, in equal strength to that which he felt watching her with Angel and later contemplating her experiences with the lamentable Abrams idiot.

Ashamed as he was of the knowledge, a part of him knew that on some level he'd always been jealous of any man who'd been close to her. From the omni-present Angel to the boy, Owen, his successor Scott something, to bloody Spike and his obsession, Giles had known jealousy and passionate dislike of all of them at one point or another.

Yet for how long had those tumultuous feelings been left deliberately undefined?

Too long…

He knew now the answer was all too simple: on some unspoken level she was his and they were usurpers, all. He would have stood by her until hell froze and beyond, and still would, if he thought it was what she wanted.

Choosing to leave again was the hardest thing he'd ever done, and the most necessary.

He had been willing to sacrifice Dawn in the fight against Glory, in order to keep Buffy from having to sacrifice herself. It was then that he knew that not only did he love her more than he'd ever loved anyone or anything, there was more, so much more. Living without her had been close to unbearable. But seeing her again, only to find her even more closed off than before her death, even less in need of him for anything other than a security blanket than ever before, was a pain…a heart ache, with which he could no longer deal.

So he'd run. Taken himself back to bloody England, to a lonely flat, a solitary life, and the beckoning of an equally empty, lonely future. Characteristically, Buffy had tried to stop him, evoked protestations from the past…

No. No longer could he heed the cries that she couldn't do it without him, without hurting her even more in the longer term…

He paused to blink away moisture, as his heart constricted painfully. Soon there were no more thoughts, just the pain. Finally, he made an angry sound and picked himself up impatiently, emerging from the shelter to find that the downpour had completely stopped.

The sun was out, and only the dripping from the trees and the roof of the shelter still sounded liking drizzling raindrops. The fire was very low, but still flickering. He drew fuel from his covered store and stoked it before his mind started to wander, looking to return to earlier thoughts. He stared at the rising flames, watching the tongues of green and blue, yellow and orange dancing on the various types of fuel and growing with every new degree of heat generated. When Buffy's beautiful face and tender bosom floated again in his thoughts he growled and stood up.

No more self-pity, no more. Instead, he picked up his stone blade, snatched his damp shorts from where he'd hung them in the lean-to, put them on, and collected his denim pouches before striking out towards the south, or what he'd designated the south, of his camp. On one of the few occasions he'd actually climbed a tree, he'd seen a rock formation in that direction, well beyond where he'd explored so far. He needed to do something, and what better time to do what he'd been putting off now for several days…?

He reached the open ground about twenty minutes after he'd blazed his last marker. He blinked. The area around the rocky tor was grassland. Not huge, but sufficiently different to the forest to make him blink again. He'd seen this phenomenon before. The Congo, which had died back and reclaimed it's territory a number of times, had the same cut off stretches of grassland in the midst of its endless forest.

Several of the grazing animals were entirely new to him, and for the first time he spied primates in some of the trees. Something was also moving on the rocks of the tor. After another longing gaze at the venison on the hoof, with care and much vigilance he made his way across the open area to the outcrop. The movements became scurrying and hopping. Small, shaggy four-legged creatures with horns bounded from rocky ledge to rocky ledge, and even smaller smooth, furry creatures hopped on their hind legs, their trilling cries obvious warnings to the rest of their clan on the granite-like tor. He wondered in passing what they would taste like, and if he would ever find a way to make himself a decent hunting weapon.

It took him two hours to climb to the top. He was glad of his residual fitness from training Buffy when he finally got there, blowing hard and feeling his muscles scream from the relentless exertion.

The view was sobering. In all directions, as far as he could see, was a carpet of dense forest bordered on one side by mountains, on another by what appeared to be ocean, while in all other directions the green carpet extended all the way to the horizon…

There still wasn't a single sign, not a plane in the air, nor tower or any kind of structure on the mountains, no light or beacon to be seen that might indicate that he was not alone in this forsaken place.

Giles sat down on a granite-like boulder to contemplate that. Spending the rest of his life, however long or short that might be, here in this place pretending he could make a passable Tarzan, Daniel Boone or even that idiot crocodile fellow, was beyond contemplating. He covered his face with his hands and sighed heavily.

Bloody typical…

The Powers That Be were never, ever going to stop making him pay for his youthful transgressions into Chaos and darkness...