"You could always try telling him I am your bodyguard. What do you think? Would he faint?"

"I'm not sure what he'd do. He might have to tell the Council, and the Council is probably not a lot of perpetually glasses-polishing Gileses."

"He hasn't told them about you so far, has he? Does he know you're the Slayer or not?"

"I think he knows. Guesses. Suspects. Has a gut feeling about it but nothing concrete. I asked what he'd do if he found her and he said he'd probably start by answering a lot of annoying questions."

"Questions such as you had no doubt been asking him immediately beforehand. Oh, yes, he knows."

"Ayeah. I mean, so far everything he's seen is theoretically explicable without my being the Slayer. But I don't think the other local teenage girls are distinguishing themselves at all, whereas I am practically neon."

"But he has exhibited no starving-dog behaviour?"

"No. He lets me come to him - which admittedly I do twice a day, so I don't know how much information that is - and he answers questions but he doesn't lecture, I'm way more likely in any given conversation to run into the end of his patience than he is to run into the end of mine. He hasn't been issuing veiled threats to the missing Slayer or anything."

"For a Watcher, that's fairly astonishing. Perhaps it's the demon drugs," he jokes.

"And yet he is not the only Watcher, Sunnydale's life expectancy is for shit, and he would have to tell all his colleagues," grumbles Bella.

"Perhaps we should tell him everything, and I can start guarding him too."

"...Guarding him to make sure he isn't replaced by a less friendly Watcher or guarding him to see that he doesn't follow through about notifying the Council?" inquires Bella.

"To see that he does not die of Sunnydale and thereby require replacement."

"Maybe. I think I'll come clean tomorrow after school. Since I do think he already knows on some level. And if he doesn't flip out or immediately turn all stern-crusty-bossy-Watcher on me I'll bring you up right after as though I never intended to leave you out."

"A reasonable plan, I think."

"Let's see to it that if he wants to put me through my punching-things paces right away, he's suitably impressed," says Bella as they reach the crypt. She trots down the stairs, takes off her crucifix, dumps the messenger bag, and stands ready, smiling.

"It would be my pleasure, dear Juliet," he says with an elaborate bow that somehow shifts seamlessly into an attack.

Practice continues roughly as normal until it's gotten late, at which time his dear Juliet takes her next win and turns it into kisses, as the previous night. "I wonder," she murmurs against his jaw after a slightly meandering kiss, "if I'm in danger of producing bad incentives."

"In what sense?" he inquires.

"Mmm, the losing-sometimes-gets-you-kisses sense," she says. "Of course, since you already found losing entertaining for other reasons perhaps I'm not making anything worse if I -" (kiss kiss.)

"Let's do that," she says, grinning down at him. "One more round, winner kisses the loser."

"I accept your terms."

Bella lets him up. But this time she doesn't wait for the attack; she tries a (clumsy, relative to her other moves if not to the general population) first-closing move. "Can't always be waiting to get jumped," she says between exchanges of kinetic energy.

"Very true," Sherlock agrees. "Good thinking."