"Look, you guys are treading seriously deep waters," Xander was ranting over their table at Denny's. "How many times am I going to have to say it? Would it do any good if you heard from somebody whose credibility you trust more: say from Snyder or the Lunch Lady?"
"You are right, Xander," Giles said in all apparent sincerity, between bites of his hamburger. "You've been right all along."
"Yep," Willow said. "It's scary how right you've been. Are you going to finish your sandwich, Cordelia?"
"Yes," Cordelia said, shoving her hands away from the plate. "You know it wouldn't hurt either of you to listen to Xander for a change and maybe -- concept -- take his advice?"
"And you admit that this spell casting thing was a bad idea?" Xander persisted.
"On the contrary, it was a good idea," Giles said, as he pushed his plate aside. He eyed Cordelia's sandwich. "What I didn't take into account was Willow's talent for innovation."
"Waitress!" Cordelia waved down the server. "Will you please get these guys something else?"
"Sure!" the young woman said, pulling her order pad from her pocket. "What'll it be?"
"Food," said Willow.
"Same here," said Giles. "Oh, and another tea."
"With milk," the waitress said with a wink. "Gotcha." She bustled off.
"So I'll stick strictly with the formula from now on," Willow continued. "No more innovations, no more trouble!"
"Oh, right, that simple," Xander said sarcastically. "If it was that simple, why didn't our wise and wonderful Watcher here think of it before?"
"It is simple," Giles reaffirmed. "For most spell casting any attempt to deviate from the prescribed ritual usually results in a nonviable spell. The goal for the average caster is a letter-perfect recreation of a given casting."
"Rote memorization -- about as boring and safe as you get," Willow said as she polished off her french fries.
"Willow has more than a modicum of feeling, however, for how magic works. She's a natural innovator." The waitress stopped by the table to set a cup of tea and a small pot of milk in front of him. "Thanks, love," he said with a smile at her.
"You're welcome," she said, grinning back.
They waited while Giles stirred the milk into his tea.
"So," said the waitress. "That's how you drink tea in England."
"Generally speaking. Yes." Giles glanced up at her and smiled again.
"Um," Xander said. "We didn't need anything else."
"I drink mine with lemon. I'll try milk next time." She hooked one ankle behind the other. "Maybe I'll have a cup when I get off. In about an hour."
"Excuse me," Xander said. "We're having a private conversation here?"
The waitress scowled at Xander, then looked at Giles again. "If you need anything," she suggested, "just whistle." She started to saunter off, but managed to collide with the next table over instead.
"-- now that we know this, we can, as Willow says, be extra careful to adhere to the original text and forgo any temptations to experiment," Giles continued.
"Uh huh!" Willow nodded in emphatic agreement.
"All right," Xander said in exasperation. He sorted through his book bag and pulled out a spiral notebook, which he shoved at Giles. "As of this moment, you've got yourself a Watcher."
"What?!" Giles blinked at him. "Don't be ridiculous."
"Come on, Giles. You were channeling major mojo back there. Can't take what you're dishing out to Willow?" Xander shoved a purple felt tip pen at him. "You write down everything you're feeling tonight. Tomorrow we'll all sit down and have a reading. If you can read out loud what you're saying tonight with a straight face tomorrow, then I'll hold the magic hat for the next trick for you guys."
With a distasteful look at the felt tip pen, Giles pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and began to makes notes in an awkward right-handed script. "I do not," he growled as he wrote, "need a Watcher. But if it will keep you from bothering Willow --"
"Write," Xander said sternly. He turned to Willow, who'd been watching the interchange with an amused expression, and thrust the felt tip pen at her. She grimaced, but took the pen and pulled out her own notebook.
"Cordy?" the young man said. "Meet you by the payphones?"
"Okay," Cordelia said when they reached their rendezvous. "I'm with the concept that this spell casting thing is getting seriously wiggy. But is it wiggy in a bad way?"
"Giles is supposed to be providing some objective guidance on this," Xander hissed. "How the hell is he going to stay objective when he's doing the magic stuff himself?"
"Right," Cordelia said. She glanced back at the table, where Giles and Willow were still writing. "Uh, Xander. It may be just my imagination and all that, but don't you think -- I mean in a totally upper-age-bracket sort of way that I really wouldn't normally notice except that we're in a Denny's -- but haven't you noticed that Giles is looking seriously dishy tonight?"
Xander stared at his girlfriend. "What?"
She flushed. "Well, like I probably wouldn't have noticed -- much -- except that Willow is kind of giving off the same kind of glow. Not that I'd notice that either -- oh okay girls sometimes do notice that sort of thing in other girls, but usually it's when they're glowing off of the guy you like. But you haven't really seemed to notice her glowing."
"I haven't noticed," Xander said indignantly. "Well, Willow's being uber-cute, but that's Willow. Why would you think I'd notice Giles? For that matter, what's this with you noticing Giles?"
Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Just forget it then, okay? What's with you and all this flaky paranoia lately? I think I liked it better when you were just obsessing over Buffy."
"Is it paranoia to show concern when my best friend is playing around with seriously dangerous magic?"
"Oh, like you did Valentine's Day?"
"Right," Xander snapped back. "So if anybody's the expert on really dumb dabbling in the black arts, it's me!"
"It's like, 'do what I tell you not what I stupidly did'," Cordelia retorted. "But I forgot. Your stupidity was for a really noble purpose, so that makes a difference."
"Yeah, the noble purpose of trying to make you fall in love with me. Tell me again: Why did I bother?"
"Because you were a romantic loser forever panting after girls who had no interest in him?"
"Cordelia and Xander are fighting again," Willow remarked.
"I wasn't aware that they had ever stopped," Giles replied between sips of his tea. He moved the notebook to one side, and placed the plate the waitress had just brought on top of it. He carefully wiped his hands on a napkin, then pulled an old pocket sized hard-bound book from his jacket.
"You're right. " Willow turned back to her second sandwich. "They have demilitarized zones in between the insults. But I thought that the zones were getting longer."
"I recently rediscovered this text at the back of one of my bookshelves," Giles said he thumbed through the book. "I purchased it several years ago at a small bookshop in Regensburg. It seemed of only historical interest then -- the writer had done extensive research into standard alchemical lore -- but time has given me some additional perspective."
Willow hauled herself up over the table so she could read the book upside down. "It's in German," she said indignantly. "I've only had a year of that."
"It's the 1953 journal of an obscure East German ophthalmologist who apparently was dabbling in black magic."
"Oooh!" Willow said with interest. "What kinds of magic?"
"He seemed to have stumbled into the occult as part of a notion that extrasensory perception could be put to use as an aid for the blind. There was an obsession at the time by the Eastern bloc scientific establishment over the possibilities of ESP, but Doktor Müller's ideas were eccentric even for their tastes. In any case, he continued his private studies with very little interference for almost a decade." Giles leafed further into the book. "At some point he suddenly developed an interest in the scrying arts."
Willow took a pickle from Giles' plate and ate it. "Does it say what got his interest?"
"Not precisely, no. What's interesting, however, is that he apparently found some reliable source of information: he goes from the standard ESP card visualization exercises to crystal gazing to some very obscure scrying spells in the course of a few months. And he felt confident enough in his new knowledge of the magic to attempt some variations."
"Like I was doing." Willow sucked thoughtfully at her Coke. "But that can be dangerous, you've been saying. With a talented caster."
"This appears to be his last journal," Giles said carefully. "And from the final entries, it's apparent that he was beginning to go insane. He'd attempted a variation on the spell for communicating with the dead that he admitted was risky: He was attempting to scry out the souls of murder victims."
"Boy," Willow said, impressed.
"But look, half a year earlier he was working with a more mundane spell. He describes a successful casting in which he exchanged communications with a colleague over a distance."
Willow stared at Giles wide-eyed. "Tonight, at the top of the spell. Just before it got out of control. I think Buffy and I were looking at each other. I thought I touched her hand."
He nodded as if he'd expected that. "You called upon the power of the Moon. That's why the spell spiraled out of control. Müller knew the pitfalls of that variation. The spell he describes here utilizes the Moon's magical powers indirectly, by incorporating the tides into the spell."
"Of course!" Willow said excitedly. She hung over the book, her forehead almost bumping his. "When can we try it?"
"Well, tomorrow night. Unless you're within a week of your -- uh -- menses."
"Oh." She sat back and ran through a calculation in her head. "That's a problem?"
"A complication. With any kind of moon magic."
She considered. "But you could do it. I could be your backup."
Giles took off his glasses and ran a hand through his hair, frowning. Willow kept quiet, letting him work through his conflict. She didn't want to drag him back into something he'd decided to walk away from years before. But if they could actually contact Buffy --!
"Damn," he said finally. "It would be simpler if she'd pick up the telephone and call."
"Maybe she got my message earlier tonight," Willow suggested. "I ought to go home and find out if anybody has called."
"Perhaps." Giles put his glasses on again. "It would save us a good deal of potential trouble." He didn't voice what they were both thinking: If it would simplify matters for them, then it probably wasn't going to happen.
They sat without speaking for several minutes. Willow appropriated the old journal and skimmed through it, looking at the hand-drawn diagrams. Giles pulled out Xander's notebook to make some additional observations.
"Where have Xander and Cordelia gone?" he finally noticed.
Willow didn't even bother to look up. "They were fighting like cats and dogs a few minutes ago. Which means they're probably out in the car now, smooching like remoras."
"Maybe you should see if they're ready to go?"
"No thank you. Unless you want to go. They'll be back in about fifteen minutes anyway."
Giles started to check his watch, and discovered with mild surprise that Willow's right hand had moved to gently interlace with the undamaged fingers of his left where it lay on the table. The pain in the hand was gone, as were the rest of his bodily aches. He eased his hand out from hers and experimentally flexed it. It felt stiff -- the bones were obviously still only partially mended -- but pain-free.
Willow looked up at him.
"Endorphins," Giles said. "The backlash of the casting must have stepped up my body's production levels."
"That's good! You look a lot better than you did earlier." She smiled at him.
He smiled back. Then frowned, unable to pinpoint exactly the uneasiness he suddenly felt.
"Giles?"
"It's nothing." He took a sip of tea, pondering that. "I hope. Pain is the body's monitoring system. It keeps us from attempting to exceed our natural limits. If it's masked --"
"But we take aspirin and stuff, don't we?" Willow persisted. "Once you know to be careful, you don't really need the pain, so why keep it?"
Giles shook his hand experimentally. "No reason," he said. "Provided that the physical pain is the only thing that's being masked."