Fic: What's in a Name

[jedi_of_urth]

Title: What’s in a Name
Author: jedi_of_urth / Tori Mc as was
Fandom: BtVS
Characters/Pairings: Buffy/Giles, Buffybot, Willow, Spike
Rating: R-ish
Word Count: 2,024
Summary: Dealing with Buffybot issues while it’s the only Buffy they have. An effort to explain why the Buffybot stopped calling Guy-les, ad in fact didn’t call him by name at all in s6.
Disclaimer: BtVS belongs to Joss and ME
Author's Notes/Warnings (fic): Spoilers through The Gift,, vague ones of Bargaining
Author’s Notes (flashback): Originally posted probably 2002 sometime, mid season 6 I would guess. Let’s just say just getting the spacing right I can see some serious story issues in this, but I’m not inclined to fix them after a decade, might as well leave them now.



Willow had to fix the flaw in the robot. Above making it stop wanting Spike, above getting exceedingly horny after Slaying, she had to make the robot able to say "Giles" right. The other problems were going to mean deleting or rewriting existing programs, pronunciation was something else entirely. Plus, she had managed to begin fixing the other problems while she'd been trying to fix the pronunciation problem. Why had Spike had the bot do that, or at least allowed it to be programmed wrong?

She'd seen the look in Giles' eyes whenever the bot mispronounced his name. None of them could look at the robot without thinking of Buffy, but it did seem to bother Giles the most. Maybe it was because he didn't know that Willow was going to bring Buffy back, but she didn't want to hurt him any more than she had to until the real Buffy was back. Fixing the bot was something she could do for him.

Finally Willow managed to find the code where she could alter the bot's pronunciation program and found the way to change the pronunciation of Giles name. She frowned as she prepared to access it; it did seem to contain some backup programming, but that wasn't making it any harder than it had already been to change it.

Even though she had been a little suspicious the second she went to alter the programming, the bot disentangled itself from wires it was connected to and ran away from Willow and out the door.



Giles lifted the glass to his lips again. Oh sweet alcohol, drink enough and he could almost forget what he wanted to forget; the sight of Buffy, his beautiful Buffy, dead. It had been weeks and he still tried to drink himself into oblivion every night, though so far he had managed surprisingly well to drink low enough amounts and recover quickly enough in the morning that Anya didn't notice when he got to work. He would say she didn't comment, but as it was Anya, she must not notice.

There came a soft knock on the door, followed by it opening. "Giles, can I talk to you a sec?" Buffy's voice said.

At least Willow seemed to have stopped the damn thing from calling him Guy-les; he hadn't known how much longer he could stand that. Unfortunately for his inebriated state she also sounded even more like Buffy than normal, he could almost pretend it was her. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Giles, I've been thinking...about us," she said moving to stand at the opposite end of the couch from him. Giles took one glance at her and wished he hadn't. Her body language was so much more realistic than he had seen it before, his mind almost believed it was Buffy and his heart only wished he could. "Giles...god this is hard to say," she continued, but she squared herself much as the real Buffy might have. "I love you, there I said it, I though you should know. I know we can't be together, not really, but I want to. I want to be with you."

Giles burst out laughing; it was terribly funny to his clouded mind. How often had he dreamed this both before and after Buffy's death, and somehow the damn bot was saying everything he would have dreamed he could hear. But the hurt look on what was to him Buffy's face stopped his laughing. What was going on? Why was it happening? Had he finally managed to drink enough alcohol to start hallucinating? Should he just take advantage of this dream as he had the ones before?

"Okay, why don't we talk about this," he said, trying not to laugh. Buffy was dead, he knew it, but he was awfully quick to have fun in his dreams of her still.

"I can think of things I would rather do," Buffy said sitting down on Giles lap, taking the glass from his hand and setting it on the table behind her as she bent to capture his mouth with her own.

Definitely a dream Giles knew, so why not go with it? He opened his mouth to her exploring tongue and met it with his own. She moved one of her hands inside his shirt and began caressing his chest. Following her lead he worked a hand under her shirt and began caressing her breast as well.

"Be with me Giles," Buffy said when he had to break the kiss for breath. "I love you so much."

"I love you Buffy," he told her in return. "I always have done so," he added before diving in for another kiss, by now having all but forgotten that this was not reality.

Their kisses grew more heated and she began touching him through his now confining pants and he cupped her rump as he picked her up and carried her to the loft. He had divested them both of clothing and she pulled him into her arms. "I love you Giles," she repeated, "make love to me please. I want you inside me."

For some reason his voice that was saying this wasn't real had taken a hike, and all he saw before him was Buffy, all his ears heard was Buffy saying the words he had longed to hear for so long, all he felt was Buffy's limbs pulling him to her and working him to greater arousal than he could now recall feeling before. He laid her down on the bed and then positioned at her entrance. He laid one hand aside her face as he prepared to enter her. "I love you so much Buffy," he repeated, not trying to hide the emotion in his voice. "Don't leave me."

The words had hardly left his mouth when he heard the door downstairs open quickly. "Giles, the Buffybot got away...Giles where are you?" Willow's voice called.

Giles looked down at Buffy's naked form before him and felt all emotion drain out of him. The robot, as he had suspected from the beginning but had allowed himself to forget. Yes, he saw it now. Buffy's body, Buffy's face, even nearly Buffy's eyes, but not Buffy's spirit as much as it had tried to emulate it. He hated the thing with a passion even greater than before and that was all he felt for the abomination before him, not even the great arousal of mere moments before. But he could not hit her, punish her for not being what she could never be, she still looked too much like Buffy.

"Get dressed," he hissed, angry and fighting back tears at the same time.

"Giles..." the bot said, Buffy's voice so pitiful his natural instinct was to comfort her.

"No," he said flatly, gathering his own clothes and dressing quickly. "Get dressed." And in final evidence that she was not Buffy, she began to do just that. Once he was dressed he prepared to leave. "Willow and I will leave, then you will leave and return home and don't tell anyone what happened."

The bot did look like she was about ready to cry and Giles had to fight the urge to take pity on her, it did no good. Giles just left and joined Willow downstairs. "I'm sorry, I wanted to be more presentable," he explained. He picked up his previously forgotten drink from the coffee table and downed it. It helped to steady his nerves. "Alright let's go. Why don't you tell me what happened?"

"I was trying to make it say your name right," Willow explained as they left the apartment. "I don't know what I did, but it took off right as I thought I had managed to fix the glitch."

Giles tried not to let his emotions show. "Alright," he said with deliberate flatness, "why don't you check the Bronze and then go home, I'll try Spike's, she's bound to return to either place eventually."

Willow nodded, not sure if she should leave him, but getting the impression he didn't want company right now, not that he did much these days. She didn't find the bot at the Bronze, but waiting at home when Willow got there. "You have to fix me," was all the bot said when Willow asked what happened. "Fix whatever you did."



Giles was waiting at Spike's crypt when the vampire returned shortly before sunrise. As soon as Spike stepped through the door he found himself pinned to the floor, his night's purchases of blood scattering. "Why?" Giles demanded in an angry, slightly slurred voice.

"Why what?" Spike demanded, indignant at being accused of something he couldn't remember doing.

"Why the robot? Why do that with the robot?"

Spike chuckled. "Red stumbled on it finally? How'd she do it? I think robot boy put several trap doors in for it to happen."

Giles shoved Spike flatter against the floor, making the vampire glad he didn't have to breathe. "Tell me why." Giles demanded again.

"Thought it might make a good backup plan. Knew if Red got her hands on it she'd experiment and this way I got a little revenge on you lot for taking it from me in that case."

"But why me?" Giles demanded, and though Spike couldn't see and wasn't sure he was hearing right he thought the Watcher's voice broke.

"Why do you think? Slayer loved you but I knew she'd hate the robot and if you got it on with the robot thinking it was her, Slay...Buffy wouldn't forgive you, I saw how she was when soldier boy thought Faith was her. Plus, it might even make you disgusted enough with yourself to not hover over her for five minutes so I could have a chance."

Giles let up his death grip on Spike, but not enough that Spike could have gotten away. "Any more surprises we should know about?" Giles hissed.

"Nah, never meant to lose my robot, but it was a nice backup plan wasn't it? So the bot still a tiger in the sack?"

Spike's head crashed into the hard floor of his crypt again and again before Giles got up to leave, leaving the nearly unconscious vampire behind.

It was still dark when he returned home and found Willow and the bot waiting on his couch. "I think I fixed her," Willow explained. "Whatever happened when I tried to fix your name set off some weird backup program. I couldn't find a way to turn it off and keep your name right so I fixed it a different way." Willow hesitated, uncertain whether he should hear the rest. "All I could do was make it so she doesn't call you by your name at all. All the rest is there," she assured him, "but she just won't have a name for you."

"Yes," the bot explained in her annoyingly chipper voice, no longer close to that of his Buffy, "you're my Watcher, should we train today?"

Giles shrugged. "We'll see. I do need some sleep now. Thank you for trying, Willow," he told her and ushered the girl and robot out the door.

He pored himself another large glass of scotch and went up the stairs to bed. Before him teasingly danced those few moments when he had allowed himself to believe his dreams had come true and forgotten that she was dead. Now in the near dawn light he could not hide from that painful truth and the tears flowed freely from his eyes onto the cold pillow beneath him.

It had ended well, he must suppose, and it wasn't going to happen again, but the finality of that statement did nothing to calm the upheaval of his heart. Never again would he hear Buffy's voice say she loved him, never again would he fall into her waiting arms as he had nearly believed he could do. Never again would he even hear his name said by Buffy's voice.

"Don't be so sure dearest," he thought he heard Buffy say, but he might well have been delusional or asleep. "Don't be so sure, Giles."