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Rupert Giles, head of the International Slayers Council, sat at his desk and stared at the stacks of paper that covered it without seeing them. He had plenty of work to do, more than enough…but all he wanted to do was think. Because yesterday all hell had broken loose inside the ranks of the Council, and he found that he was still trying to process it all.
It had started the day before when he was alerted that Xander Harris had gone missing; apparently the young man had gone for a walk in a nearby park several hours earlier and simply never come back. Rupert’s first question had been wanting to know why an absence of a few hours was cause for alarm, and he hadn’t been impressed when informed that the reason was “because it was Xander.” His second question, wanting to know who had raised the alarm, had led him to Willow Rosenberg. Willow was a witch, a very powerful one – a little too powerful sometimes, in that she sometimes forgot that just because she could do something didn’t mean that she should. Rupert knew this, and he had people watching her just in case things got out of hand. Obviously they hadn’t been watching closely enough, though, because Willow’s reason for declaring her friend Xander missing had been…that he had left the park and gone someplace else. Xander, at least according to Willow, was not supposed to be wandering around on his own.
Rupert had made her repeat that twice, just to make sure he was hearing it correctly. Xander was twenty-eight years old and had just recently returned from Africa, he could certainly go exploring on his own in London if he felt like it. Willow had immediately disagreed on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘safe’ and presented Rupert with evidence that it hadn’t been: Xander’s watch. Apparently someone other than Xander had been in possession of the watch, and for some reason all of her spells had tracked the watch instead of its owner. The person who had been found with the watch claimed to have found it near a walking path in the woods at the park Xander visited every day, and several people questioned at the park after that had said that they’d seen Xander go into the woods earlier that day. He hadn’t come out, but the watch had: ergo, he was missing and had probably been kidnapped. People were searching the woods right now…
Question number three had interrupted her: What spells? Why did she have spells on Xander?
She’d looked at him as though he was asking the stupidest question in the world. Didn’t he realize that Xander needed to be protected? In case something happened or he went off on his own, the spells would let Willow know so that someone could go get him and bring him home. It was all about keeping Xander safe…
Rupert had taken the watch away from her at that point, and told her to call a halt to the search until he’d brought it back. He’d taken it straight to the nearest not-power-mad witch and asked her what was going on. She’d looked, laughed, and told him, at which point Rupert had left the watch with her for further study and gone back to Willow, furious, to ask his fourth question: Had Xander asked her to put those spells on him? Had he given her permission to do so?
Willow hadn’t appeared to understand the question, and had launched into another spiel about needing to keep Xander safe – which Rupert had interrupted icily with the information that he knew she hadn’t had permission, because if she had then her spells wouldn’t have slid off the protective magical barrier that was on Xander and stuck to his deliberately unprotected watch instead. Rupert’s cell phone had rang at that point, he’d answered it..and after a moment of listening he’d informed Willow that there were a dozen spells stuck to the watch and demanded to know just what the hell she’d been thinking – and that if she started on about Xander’s safety again he was going to slap her.
Willow had gone wide-eyed, all too obviously trying to figure out which twelve spells those had been and come up with an excuse for having used each of them. Rupert had given the no-longer-amused witch on the other end of the phone a curt affirmative to her question as to whether she and her coven should come over immediately to bind Willow’s powers, and then he’d hung up. He’d known at that point that it was entirely possible – although it sounded slightly ludicrous, considering his age – that Xander had simply run away. Willow had said he walked in the park every day, so question number five was: Had Xander ever said why he walked in the park every day?
That had gotten him a sniff. He’d said he was homesick, but that hadn’t made any sense to Willow or Buffy because Africa wasn’t his home and Sunnydale hadn’t looked anything like London or Africa…
Oh look, Rupert had thought to himself, this tiny little slick patch was merely the tip of a great bloody iceberg. Buffy was a part of this?
Buffy had agreed with Willow that Xander was just being silly, and that he didn’t belong in Africa.
Suspicion which had been blossoming, bloomed. Question six: Why did Xander come back from Africa? Did he want to come back from Africa?
Another sniff. Xander didn’t know what was good for him. He’d just been tagging around after that other Watcher, probably annoying him. He needed to be where people knew him and could look out for him. He was handicapped! And Africa was dangerous, and there was no one to watch him there…
Probably because no one had needed to – and missing an eye hardly made him all that handicapped, unless he was taking a driving exam. Not to mention that their sole Watcher in Africa, a man named Worthington, had communicated with Rupert more than once in his reports about how nice it was to have some competent help who wasn’t afraid of everything that moved on the whole bloody continent and didn’t treat every villager they met like a wild, uneducated savage. Sending Xander to Africa had apparently been the best thing the Council had done for Worthington in a decade.
Willow didn’t believe it. Maybe this Worthing-person had been putting spells of his own on Xander, maybe he’d wanted to keep him for himself, maybe he was even a…
Rupert had told her to shut up at that point, because Sam Worthington’s cousin just happened to work in the building and probably wouldn’t have taken it kindly if she’d overheard her relative being called a demonic sex-fiend. Rupert hadn’t taken it kindly either, for that matter – and not just on Sam’s behalf. Question seven: Had Willow and Buffy somehow forced Xander to leave Africa?
Xander didn’t belong in Africa. They’d told him he had to come home, and he’d known they were right so he’d eventually stopped being stubborn about it. The third time they’d ordered Xander to get on a plane, he’d said okay and done it without any arguments. Three, Willow had informed Rupert smugly, was the magic number.
Rupert had just stared at her in disbelief, wondering how someone so intelligent could possibly be so blindly stupid. Three was, indeed, a magic number. And Xander had been with Sam, who knew half of Africa and a good number of very powerful sorcerers and magic users into the bargain. Xander thought of Africa as his home, had done well there, had in fact stayed there for nearly two years…and then he’d suddenly ‘stopped being stubborn’ the third time they’d told him to leave and he’d come to London with no argument at all, and with a spell on him that would make any magic cast without his permission slide off and stick to the watch he’d had someone deliberately un-protect for just that purpose. The watch he had discarded in the woods during a walk in a park he frequented daily, by himself, after which he had simply disappeared.
Willow had still been going on about things that only made sense to her and possibly to Buffy when the coven had shown up, and after that she’d been sulking and Rupert had left her to it. His telephone conversation with Buffy had only impressed him with the fact that she was, incredibly enough, just slightly more blindly stupid than Willow, and he’d hung up glad that she was planning to go back to Italy soon. Then he’d called Sam in Africa to ask question number eight: Did the African Watcher know anything about what was going on? Sam had picked up immediately after the first ring and foregone a normal hello by roaring, “Rupert, old man, I knew you’d call!” and then laughing. A lot. Before making several comments that proved he knew Xander was gone, and then giving Rupert a rough account of what one of the local sorcerers had told Xander – that if he was ordered to leave Africa three times it meant that it was time for him to go meet the destiny that was waiting for him.
Rupert did not need to see Sam to know he was rather gloating because Xander so obviously hadn’t trusted anyone at the Council enough to share any of this with them, although apparently half of Africa knew about it through word of mouth. And to add insult to injury, a messenger – Sam would not tell Rupert what kind of messenger – had come to Sam that afternoon to tell him that Xander had met his destiny and that he was well and safe and apparently quite satisfied with the way things had worked out.
Rupert had hung up feeling very much like Sam hadn’t told him even half of what he actually knew about the situation, and then he’d gone back to the coven and asked for their help in the park to work out the answer to question number nine: What exactly had happened in the woods earlier that day? He’d known they might not be able to figure out where Xander had gone, but he’d at least wanted to know how the younger man had gotten there.
They’d come back from the park near midnight, tired and cold and…surprised. Although Rupert had fallen into his bed thinking that they probably shouldn’t have been. There were traces, faint traces of magic some distance from the path and the place where Xander’s watch had been found. Fey magic. Rupert had slept badly that night, risen early in spite of it, and then sent out a general message to the effect that Xander Harris was not missing, the young man had simply chosen a rather unique way to leave the Council’s employ and that he was just fine and should be left alone.
Willow, several people had reported to him, was still wailing about that last part. Rupert had consequently told his secretary to get with the coven and find the girl some magically-knowledgeable psychological help, because until she’d been cleared by a professional he wasn’t even going to entertain the idea of unbinding her magic. Mainly because he knew that if she got the power back and tried to use it to find Xander, she probably was just stupid enough to try assaulting whoever the young man was working for and then the Fey would absolutely flatten her. At which point Buffy would decide that the Slayers needed to go after the Fey…and, well, Rupert wasn’t really up for starting the magical war to end all magical wars, because wrangling teenaged Slayers and forestalling the odd apocalypse was keeping him busy enough, thank you very much.
That, and trying to keep up with all the paperwork. Rupert sighed and pulled the nearest stack of papers onto the blotter in front of him, picking up his pen. Wherever Xander was, whatever it was he was doing…at least it was probably better than dealing with paperwork, co-dependent witches and fluff-brained Slayers. Rupert didn’t feel the need to ask question number ten – Would they ever seen Xander again? – although many other people at the Council were asking it this morning and probably would be asking it for some time to come. Not Rupert, however; because he was sure that, Xander being Xander, they almost certainly hadn’t seen the last of him.