I love the smell of desperate librarian in the morning

I lover her sassiness

I love her competence

I love her fearlessness

I love ‘oh no, please, call me Jenny, Ms. Calendar’s my father’

I love her style

I love her brilliance

I love her forwardness

I love ‘I’ll see if I can make you squirm’

I love her feminist, anti-racist, anti-elitist, egalitarian critique of academia

I love that she’s open to reconsidering her first impression of someone when they’ve just made a moving speech about how the getting of knowledge should be smelly new information and depths become apparent

I love ‘that’s not where I dangle it’

I love that she’s complicated and messy and has a hard time figuring out what she wants (and will shoot you in the back with a crossbow about it)

I love that she took Giles to fucking monster trucks just because she knew he’d hate it

I love that she’s caught in an impossible situation and is trying so hard to do right by everyone involved and when it blows up in her face she’s determined to make it right. (Not that it was even her fault, her uncle sent her in there with fucking nothing. She was a lamb to the fucking slaughter.) And almost fucking succeeds because she’s absolutely brilliant. I hate that she dies, but I love that the reason isn’t actually for the emotional torment of the survivors, that’s secondary fun for Angel, first and foremost, it’s because she’s a fucking THREAT. It’s because she’s so fucking good at what she does that she’s too dangerous to live.

I love whatever hungover, ADHD, bisexual chaos is happening here:

I just… I want to marry her, okay?

Anyway Headcanons!

- Never sneezes just once, but whether 2 or 3 at a time is unpredictable so after the second she’s always just kind of hanging there uncertainly? Waiting to see if there will be another?

If she sneezes a fourth time she KNOWS she’s getting sick. And has been known to mutter “oh no/oh fuck” out loud, with genuine dread in her voice.

(Giles, for whom there is no consistency in the number of times he’s liable to sneeze, finds this predictability fascinating.)

- Probably not every year, but consistently enough to be a pattern, she gets an absolutely miserable summer cold. And it’s so infuriating because it’s not that unusual for he to have made it through the entire school year, working in a veritable petri dish, without catching anything, and then? Two to four weeks into the summer, when she’s supposed to be getting to enjoy her vacation, she gets completely steamrolled. It’s never just a mild cold, it’s always the kind that has you feeling heavy and gross and wretched, the kind were there’s no hope of mostly ignoring it and still going about your plans or enjoying yourself in anything.

Her non-academic friends “kindly” and “helpfully” point out that at least it’s convenient that it happens when she doesn’t have to try to work through it or get her classes covered. If looks could kill. This is the time of year when she’s supposed to get to indulge herself and have fun, and her idea of fun indulgence is very much NOT lying around sweating and feeling like ass.

- She’s one of those people who sometimes fans their face when a sneeze is kind of stuck and teasing and not quite coming to fruition, but only when she’s alone. (Giles witnesses it at some point when she doesn’t realize he’s stepped into her classroom between classes and he thinks it’s the most endearing thing he’s ever seen.)

When she’s not alone she scrunches her nose around in a way she thinks is subtle, but is not. Has also been known to absently rub at the bridge of her nose with a pencil when it’s itchy, without really noticing she’s doing it.

- Not especially loud sneezes, but decisive. Sharp and sibilant and forceful enough that they bend her at the waist.

- Steepled hands coverer. Or alternatively into her shoulder, especially if her hands are full.

- Okay, hear me out, I know there’s no evidence for this in the canon, but what if magic, if spells, have a physical, tactile presence that some people can feel? What if Jenny is one of those people? What it the sensation of it is a kind of buzzing, static-y thing? What if it’s… itchy?

Basically I’m saying what if Jenny is functionally allergic to spells?

- I could see her being once of us. And if she is, I think it’s the one sexual thing she’s actually shy about. Which is a problem when your boyfriend is both incurably intellectually curious and a lot more open to kinky bedroom shenanigans than you initially anticipated.

He wants to know everything. Has she always felt this way about sneezing? What exactly is it about it that she finds so appealing and arousing? Is it the sound? The visual? The sensation of it on her end? Is it the universality of it? The vulnerability? Is it just sneezing or does the appeal extend to, say sniffling as well? The blowing of one’s nose? Noses generally? What about coughing? Is that adjacent in a way that titillates? Is there anything he personally could be doing in regards to his own sneezing that would make the experience even better for her?

She’s retreating under the covers and she’s never coming back out and “oh my god Rupert, you have to stop”.

Scenarios:

Having gone well over the prescribed 3 for the previous 2 categories, I’m oddly having a hard time coming up with many scenarios, BUT:

It’s her and Giles’s fourth date, he’s asked her out to dinner somewhere not extravagantly fancy or anything, but nice-ish, and then some kind of art house movie that she’s going to tease him about even though actually it’s totally up her alley too, and she’s woken up the morning of with that telltale scratchiness in her throat. Soon joined by a runny nose, intermittent sneezing, and a tickly cough.

She could call and ask to reschedule of course, but so far their dates have amounted to:

1. A football game where they almost got blown up by Frankenstein’s running back.

2. Not really even technically a date, just hanging out together at parent-teacher night. Which got crashed by a bunch of vampires.

3. Monster trucks, which was mostly just a joke to see how far she could push him, how far his patience would hold out. And also got interrupted by Slayer business.

So she’d really like to get in one real date that doesn’t get cut short by an apocalypse and, ideally, make a good impression (because, y'know, she's not sure she did with the monster trucks, that might have been a step too far) so instead she doses herself up to the hilt with cold medicine, covers up the most egregious physical evidence with makeup, and offers up a prayer to any deities who might be willing to take pity on her that she get through this evening without fucking things up.

It goes okay at first, but unfortunately she’s miscalculated both how bad this cold is and how much cold medicine she can tolerate without ending up high as a kite.

Which backfires in multiple ways, because not only is it still pretty obvious she’s under the weather despite the drugs, but because she’s now kinda loopy Giles is becoming increasingly convinced (and concerned!) that she’s running a significant fever. To the point that he eventually, very courteously, inquires if he could please feel her forehead and is genuinely surprised that she isn’t overly warm.

At which point she has to sheepishly explain that yeah, no, she’s not feverishly delirious, she’s just accidentally robotripping. And then of course she has to explain what robotripping is. (I think he’s familiar with the concept once it’s explained — guy used to habitually get high on possession after all, I imagine he’s no stranger to recreational drug use — he’d just never heard the term before.)

Anyway, cue a lot of —

“Oh, Jenny, you should have said you were ill!” “I didn’t want to ruin our first normal date!” “And this is going swimmingly?”

And then of course he insists on taking her home, and upon learning what sort of supplies she has on hand insists on stopping to stock her up on appropriately therapeutic teas, and lotion infused tissues, and probably ingredients for soup —

“I’m not gonna make soup from scratch, Rupert.” “No, I’m going to make soup for you.” [Tiny little very touched and unused to being care for] “Oh.”