Slayer dreams #10

[truepenny]

I dreamed that in honor of the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss went back and added a two-parter to Season 2, to fit in somewhere between "Innocence" and "Passion." So we're back in Season 2, Jenny's still alive, and Giles ... Giles is having trouble.

He's having these urges to hurt people: burn them, cut them--and not torture, either, but booby-traps rigged to take the victim completely by surprise. This is Ripper, or part of why Giles became Ripper in the first place. He fights against it and fights against it, but, because he's Giles, he doesn't tell anyone else there's anything wrong, and he's just not strong enough alone, and a student gets hurt.

Giles goes to pieces. Jenny comes into the library and finds him frantically trying to make everything safe. He's shaking and haggard; the tweedy, prissy librarian facade has shivered into pieces. Whoever Giles is behind it, he's coping with something larger and more terrible than any vampire, demon, or world-ending spell. And it is destroying him. Even when Eyghon was tracking him, Giles didn't look this driven, this haunted ... this close to despair.

Jenny says cautiously, "Rupert, it's not your fault."

"But it is," he says, not looking at her. "My fault. All of it."

She doesn't know what's going on, but she realizes he's on the brink of collapse and insists on taking him to see a doctor. She's in the waiting room and a nurse comes out and says, "You can go home now, miss."

"But, my friend ..."

"He's signed the papers to have himself committed. He doesn't want to see you."

And the credits roll.

***
My conclusion: my subconscious is evil. I had meta-dreams after that, worrying about how Joss was going to tie everything up tidily in the second episode so as to reinsert into the stream of S2 continuity without any hitches, but I never got the second episode. And now I miss Jenny all over again. Wah!