Title: Leap, Plunge, and Move on
Author: Coast2Coast
Rating: T
Genre: General
Status: Complete
Fandom: Quantum Leap & Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairings: Mild Giles/Buffy (b/c Sam didn't know better)
Summary: Sam Beckett leaps into Rupert Giles a little over a week before the final conflict with Glory.
Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6272663/1/Leap-Plunge-and-Move-On

I initially put this in "Almost Recommended" with a tentative 3/5 rating, but today I realized that I'd just finished reading it for the third time. Any fanfic that I bother to read more than once, let alone three times, deserves a 4/5 in my book if only because I enjoyed it that much.

It does help to have some knowledge of Quantum Leap (I'm assuming anyone considering reading it is familiar with Buffy, but in both cases having a little knowledge helps).

For the uninitiated, Quantum Leap was a show that aired from 1989-1993. Sam "leaped" into bodies of people in the past, basically possessing them, and "fixed" things in their lives that were going to go wrong. He had help from Al, a hologram, who was really in the future where Sam's body was. The people he "leaped" into would end up in his body in the future.

Story is complete at around 34k words. It's reasonably fast paced though some of the earlier parts with Giles seemed to drag slightly. Story takes place near the end of Season 5 of Buffy. I'm not a fan of Giles/Buffy but in this case, well, it's easy to argue that Sam just didn't know that Giles wouldn't have pursued it. The author also has a minor problem with telling instead of showing in places.

 

There's no sex or anything, if that helps. There's a kiss and some awkward discussion of where it's going. The story fits far better into "General" than "Romance," it's more of an aside.

...but yeah, lol. I can't see any evidence for it in canon.