“Try not to bleed on my
couch; I just had it steam-cleaned...” Giles
singing in 'Restless'.
The morning light trickled through the windows, gleefully giving every
smear and finger print their day in the sun. Giles glanced up, as a
particularly mischievous beam tickled his face, and watched,
captivated, as the dust motes danced within the golden light. His gaze
travelled around the room and he frowned. Oh, dear. The place was
looking positively shabby. He had never dared to risk hiring a cleaning
service - too many mystical items lurking around for that to be
feasible, not to mention the weapons - but he usually managed to keep
the place relatively clean and tidy.
Regretfully putting down his book, a particularly fascinating
exploration of the mating rituals of the Benzogii demons, he wandered
around, wondering where to start first. The couch caught his eye at
once as it was in the path of the sunbeam, every spot and stain
mercilessly highlighted.
“Good God,” Giles muttered. “I’ve actually been sitting on that?”
He made his way to the kitchen and opened a cupboard, studying the
meagre assortment of cleaning products and marvelling at their ability
to cut through grease, destroy germs, fight bacteria. “Perhaps Buffy
should take some on patrol,” he thought cynically, too wise to be taken
in by their optimistic pictures of gleaming floors and sparkling
surfaces. “Ooh! Fabric cleaner! Guaranteed to hmm, hmm, not for use on,
yes, yes... spray, leave, and vacuum off. I can do that!”
Beaming brightly, he set about restoring the couch to something
approaching a sanitary state. The foam fizzed out and he watched in
fascination as the couch turned into a cloud of white. As he sat back
and waited for the foam to die down, sipping on a cup of tea as he
didn’t believe in working one’s fingers to the bone in the worship of
the goddess Hestia, he found his mind cataloguing the various stains.
That smear of black on the arm of the couch; that was left there from
Xander’s sleeve. The lad had scrambled under a car, trying to escape a
demon with a hide so tough that Buffy’s punches had seemed to do no
more than tickle it. He had tried to wiggle out the other side to
resume the attack and his sleeve had snagged on something hanging down,
trapping him there. Then the demon had focused on his thrashing legs
and started to pull...Giles shuddered. Xander had been in such a state
that he hadn’t had the heart to scold him for the mess he’d made, when
they returned to his house for a very necessary cleaning and, according
to Buffy and Willow, equally necessary cocoa and cookies.
When Olivia had been recovering from her encounter with the Gentlemen,
Giles had tried to calm her by pouring them both a stiff brandy. That
hadn’t been spilled, except internally, but it had indirectly been
responsible for the rather large wet patch on the centre cushion, the
one that had dried in the shape of the African continent, as Giles had
discovered the next day, as with pounding head and trembling hands,
he’d sponged away at it as best he could, refusing to think about
desperate kisses, exploring fingers and a messy, if agonisingly
blissful conclusion...dealing with the bitter knowledge that he’d lost
Olivia for good.
Shivering with the memories and gulping down scalding tea to calm
himself, Giles let his eyes move along and up. Bright green splodges.
Tara tripping and spilling a potion supposed to cure Willow’s hiccups.
Brown dots; Buffy licking frantically at a chocolate popsicle on a day
so hot it was melting almost as soon as she tore off the wrapper, her
pink tongue curling around it as the droplets dripped from the stick
and fell unnoticed...
With a pang of sorrow, Giles realised that he didn’t want this living
journal to be obliterated, didn’t want the memories to be wiped clean.
If Adam turned out to be the one foe they could not vanquish, it seemed
so silly to be fretting about minor details. He looked at the couch.
The foam had sunk in and dried. Sighing sadly, he went to fetch the
vacuum cleaner, his brow furrowing as he tried to fix on an attachment
he’d never used before. After it had roared to life, he set about his
task, still wallowing in nostalgia. He finished, stepped back and swore.
“It’s not touched it! Bloody waste of time!”
Fuming he stalked over to the phone directory, flipped through the
pages and then called a number. “Hello? Is that ‘Ezee-Steam, We Get It
Clean’? I wonder if you could come out as soon as possible. I have some
furniture... A special offer? The hallway counts as a room? But I don’t
really have a hallway. No, the stairs are... well, I suppose if it’s
twenty percent off on Tuesdays...”
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