‘Seconds’

NOTES: I was watching the Zeppo, and wondered what Giles had done, that Buffy thought was so brave ..

He’d had only seconds in which to act.

A final few seconds of chaos, terror, and madness. The last of the sisterhood were dead. The spell had been cast. The hellmouth was closing.

And Angel was down, seized by the hell beast, being dragged into the vortex even as it shrank and collapsed in on itself.

Seconds.

He remembered every one of them.

Remembered Buffy’s arching flight thorough the air as the creature’s flailing tentacles tossed her away, into the stacks.

Remembered her scream of terror and denial as she struggled to her feet and realised she would never reach the unconscious vampire in time to save him.

Remembered Faith’s angry curse as she too realised the same thing.

Remembered the look on Willow’s face, the stark wide eyed comprehension that she might have spoken too soon or too late, that the hellmouth was closing, was taking their undead champion and it was going to be her fault.

And remembered his own foolish, irrational reaction; the forward fling that had sent his sword deep in the eye of the beast, making it rear up, allowing him to dive forward with utterly insane, utterly unbelievable intention.

Straight into the hellmouth.

Long seconds.

There’d been the whisper of hot breath and the gnashing of teeth as mouth tipped tentacles snapped in his wake.

The impact of his body with another, cold and limp and centuries dead.

The feel of the surface beneath them both, dank and slimed and moving.

The scrape of scales across his cheek as he rolled and grabbed and kept rolling, pulling that limp form with him.

The sear of poisoned spittle burning his hand, eating into his exposed arm.

The pull of the hellmouth as it sucked in the noise and the light and the furious scream of frustration and pain.

The smell of the beast, an unbearable stench that would be forever etched into his nostrils.

And the sudden silence, the relief of rolling over and over on cold linoleum until he had come to rest, shaking and gasping at the foot of the stairs.

With Angel in his arms.

He remembered what came next, too. The way Buffy had stampeded across the library to catch her dead lover’s shoulder and roll him out of her Watcher’s embrace and into her own. The long moment of silence while she stared and prayed and whispered a lost soul’s name, over and over.

‘Angel’.

‘Angel.’

He remembered how the vampire had stirred and woken, and how she’d dipped in to kiss him, to welcome him back with desperate relief. He’d already been halfway back to his feet by then, lifted by solicitous hands, by Faith and by Willow, one of them patting him down in disbelief to find him still in one piece, the other wanting to hug him with relief. He’d dissuaded Faith from too intimate a contact, hugged Willow a little shakily - and waited, watching as he always watched, seeing the vampire smile at his Slayer, seeing her smile back, so lovingly.

He hated it. Hated it and adored it, and lived with it like a sword in his heart.

Every day.

Every second.

"Buffy," Angel had murmured. "You saved me …"

"No," she’d denied, finally – finally – lifting her eyes from his to seek a second pair elsewhere in the room. And the smile that came with that look was worth every moment of that pain, repaid every moment of his continued existence. "Wasn’t me. It was Giles …"

‘The bravest thing I’ve ever seen,’ she would say later, meaning it, offering him gratitude and admiration and no little affection with it.

‘Stupid really,’ he would reply with embarrassment, ducking his head, dismissing his scrapes and bruises as though they didn’t matter.

Stupid? To risk his life for a dead man, to chance fate simply to recover the hands that had broken his bones and tortured him so expertly?

Looked at that way, of course it was.

But that was the rational way of thinking. Consideration after the event. Justification and analysis and all the ‘did I really do that’ realisation that had kept him shaking for the rest of the night.

There hadn’t been time for rational decisions.

He’d had only seconds to act.

Seconds in which to obey the dictates of his Slayer’s heart, rather than his own.

He remembered every one of them.