TITLE: Needed
AUTHOR: Kerry Blackwell
PAIRING: none (or B/G undertones if you want to see them there)
RATING: G
DISCLAIMER: All things Buffy belong to Joss Whedon, UPN, the WB, FOX and Mutant Enemy and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. I own only my genius (yeah, right!)
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is an alternative ending to "Buffy vs Dracula" and also deals with some Giles issues I've thought needed covering for a long time.

"Bugger."

The clipped epithet, uttered in a clearly frustrated British accent, produced litle more than a few curious looks. After all, LAX saw visitors from all corners on the world passing through its corridors and trying to sleep in its moulded chairs or on its patterned carpets. One annoyed English traveller was nothing out of the ordinary.

The man who had spoken was staring at the Departures board, his lips curved into a frown. The bloody flight had been delayed. Again. He was beginning to suspect that there was some gigantic cosmic conspiracy playing out at his expense and that he was never going to manage to leave this God-forsaken country. In most people such a thought would be considered paranoia; for Rupert Giles there was a definite possibility he might be right.

His bag had been checked through from Sunnydale. Just the single suitcase; he might have thought long and hard about this departure, but in the end the actual leaving had been rushed and disorganised. He'd send for everything else from England, once he was settled there again and he had a place to store everything. In the meantime, the children could use his books and other resources. It might even give Willow time to finish the scanning job he had abandoned half way through.

Was he running? Making a strategic retreat? Or a carefully planned and considered departure that should be best for everyone concerned? He liked to think it was the latter, but he had a suspicion that fight or flight had kicked in as they walked out of Dracula's castle and saw it dissolve into mist behind them. And since he was standing here, glaring at the International Departures board at Los Angeles airport, it looked like flight had won.

He tightened his grip on his travelling case and sighed. The ETD had changed yet again, granting him still another fifteen minutes on American soil. Which meant he now had nearly an hour and a half to kill. For a moment, he could hear Buffy's voice, asking how the phrase had originated and offering several highly unlikely explanations, but he brushed the thought away. He was leaving all that behind. Leaving her behind.

He could go through the departure gate and sit on the uncomfortable airport chairs though there, but he suddenly found he wasn't quite ready yet to make that last, final step. He wished things were still the rush they had been in Sunnydale, changing his flight dates, calling a taxi the moment he finished talking to the airline. The heart-stopping trip though the familiar streets, wondering if he was going to miss his newly-scheduled short hop flight to LA. It had all been such a rush he hadn't had to think about what he was doing. Now, thanks to the vagaries of weather and flight control, he suddenly had more time to think than he really wanted.

Alternative option - sit on an uncomfortable airport chair out here in the general concourse. He shook his head. That wasn't even slightly more appealing. If he was going to be forced to wait - and to think - he might as well do it in style.

Giles took the last free table near the window. Unlike the other patrons, who were watching the planes landing and departing as they ate and drank and said their goodbyes, he chose to sit with his back to the view, staring instead into his untouched glass of scotch.

Where had it all gone wrong? So wrong that he was sitting here waiting for a flight to London that, if he was to be completely honest, he didn't want to take at all.

Back to grey weather and age-old traditions that it had taken distance to make him see could be stifling. He didn't even have a job. If he begged enough the British Museum might take him back, but they had never understood why he had left such a prestigious position for the downwardly mobile step of becoming a high school librarian - and in America of all places.

He hadn't been able to tell them that he had gone to be Watcher to Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. And he couldn't tell them now that he was back because the petite blonde teenager didn't need him anymore.

He turned the glass around on the table a few times, not seeing the rings the movement left on the wood, not caring. A Watcher and a Slayer were supposed to be partners, stalwart companions in the fight against evil where he provided the information and instructions and she the strength and fighting skill.

So where had it gone so wrong?

They hadn't got off to a perfect start of course. He had been stuffy and uptight and very, very British. She had been defensive and sassy and everything he had feared a Californian teenager would be.

But it hadn't taken him long to discover the real Buffy underneath, caring and strong and facing a destiny he hadn't realised could be such a burden when it had all been theory out of his books and studies. She had shown him what it really meant to be the Slayer; not just fighting demons, but struggling with pain and heartbreak and impossible decisions, all while trying desperately to have some kind of normal life, just for herself.

He had been horrified when she had expanded their secret circle of two to include Willow and Xander, later adding in Cordelia, Oz, even Angel. His own words came back to him suddenly - A vampire in love with the Vampire Slayer. How ironic. He shook his head and pushed at the glass again, sliding it across the table so that he didn't swallow it all in one gulp and immediately order more. Ironic really didn't begin to cover it.

He wasn't a fool. He knew Angel loved Buffy. Angel would always love Buffy in some shape or form. Hopefully not in the head-over-heels teenage way they had started out, where Angel had suddenly lost any experience he might have gained in 250-odd years and behaved like he was little more than sixteen himself, but there would always be a bond between them, something that linked them together despite everything.

It was the kind of bond some of the old books said occasionally manifested between a Watcher and Slayer. The kind he had dreamed of having with Buffy. But Angel had beaten him there too.

She had needed him. In the past, at the beginning.

When he had been the new librarian in town and she the new kid in school, despite a somewhat antagonistic beginning, they had formed a partnership that could have been the stuff legends were made of. Buffy might be unorthodox, but she was brilliant. And he, tweedy and stuffy though she sometimes called him, he learned to adjust to her unexpected shifts and changes.

Together, they had done good. They had defeated the Master's minions, saved Xander and Willow - several times - and gained two new fighters for the cause. They had faced vampires and demons, a psychopathic cheerleading witch and an invisible girl, the very Hellmouth and the Master himself. Later, there had been Spike and his insane lady and all their ambitious, outrageous plans for killing the Slayer, not to mention plain old death and destruction. Together, he and Buffy had done their share to made the world a safer place.

But the trials had come early. Angel, Jenny, Eyghon and Ripper, all things that could have torn their relationship apart and sometimes nearly did.

And of course, worst of all, there had been Angelus.

He had tried so hard to be there for Buffy in the aftermath, as she closed in on herself and her guilt and self-recrimination. In retrospect, despite everything, that still made Giles angry. She had blamed herself so completely, for something that while perhaps irresponsible, was totally human. The others had been so quick to blame her too and no-one seemed to remember that the Kalderdash curse required "perfect happiness" which proved just how special her night with Angel must have been.

One is supposed to remember first love with fond nostalgia and remembered joy. Giles could still remember his, and while it had never been going to lead to anything long term, the memory could still bring a smile his face. Buffy's first love had contained both perfect happiness and terrible pain, but the shadow of Angelus meant she would always remember the latter rather than the former.

For that alone he could have crushed Angelus into dust with pleasure. But irony had not yet finished with the Slayer and her vampire. In the end it had been Angel, with soul returned and confusion in his eyes, that she had to send to Hell. And the pain from that had been so great all she could do was run from it. Into another life, another name, a dank corner to lick her wounds.

All the same, he didn't hate Angel. True, he sometimes had to forcibly remind himself of that fact, but he didn't. No, the debacle that had been Angelus' return had been no more Angel's fault that it had been Buffy's, although both of them had been quick to blame themselves for it. It appeared that Angel was, at last, actually doing something about that redemption he craved so much, but back when he had been with Buffy, in many ways he had been little older than she, despite his age and experience. He had gone from careless youth to nightmare monster, Scourge of Europe to a lost, guilty child. They might have made some terrible mistakes along the way, but it was when he met Buffy that he finally began to grow up.

Giles thought of himself, tweedy librarian, and had to smile. Buffy had that effect on people. Totally unconsciously, she sparked the potential in people, made them develop into the people they didn't know they could be. Look at Xander, at Willow, at himself. They would be different, lesser people without Buffy in their lives.

As would Angel. Whom he didn't hate. Whom he could work with for Buffy's sake. Whom he really, truly didn't hate, because it hadn't been Angel making jokes about chainsaws and cutting patterns into his skin for the fun of it.

Giles snorted quietly as the familiar litany ran though he head. Me rather thinks the Watcher doth protest too much.

Yes, he knew it all intellectually, but his body remembered differently. It remembered pain and agony, shame and fear. A mockingly beautiful face that still haunted his dreams in a way that would horrify its current owner if he knew about it.

Giles gaze locked on the glass of scotch again and it was all he could do not to knock it to the ugly airport carpet, or reach out for it and swallow it whole.

That was when he had needed Buffy - and she had sent the Scoobies while she went after Angel. She had left him to heal without her while she ran away from the consequences of her actions.

But perhaps that was an unfair example. She had been there for him when Jenny was killed. She knew him well enough to understand how his mind was not working and she had come after him to save him from his grief and his stupidity. She had forgiven him after the disaster of her eighteenth birthday. She had, in all honesty, been abominable to poor Wyndham-Pryce when the man had arrived to take up the position of her Watcher. Giles' lips curved just slightly. And he hadn't exactly helped. They had been like two small children, gleefully and pettily uniting against the big, bad grown up.

Perhaps it was really all his fault, that she had moved on from him. When she had started college a year ago he had tried to push her gently towards independence. But it had backfired on him mercilessly, as she drifted further and further from him.

First there was Parker - in some ways an unavoidable Buffy disaster and one that he still felt guilty about not recognising sooner and trying to prevent. Not that she would have listened to any advice from him on her love life, but he felt guilty about it all the same.

Then came Riley Finn, and after him the Initiative. That was where the end began. Even when the Initiative was destroyed, there was still Riley. Oh, they had regrouped and reconciled, the original Scooby Gang, when they needed to fight Adam. But everything was different now, everyone split into couples and no longer needing him. Xander and Anya, Willow and Tara, Buffy and Riley.

Buffy and Riley.

He understood all that intellectually as well. But it didn't matter. If he was honest, it wasn't intellect that had driven him to be sitting in this bar, waiting a flight back to a home to which he didn't want to return. It was the hurt in his heart.

Buffy had grown up. She didn't need him anymore. It is a teacher's job to make himself redundant, but he hadn't expected it to hurt this much. What was a Watcher without his Slayer?

When he had met Kendra, the text book perfect Slayer, while it had been nice, to be able to talk books and theory and ancient lore, he had known that Buffy, his Buffy, was better. When he had been fired, replaced by a man who, at the time, could only be described as incompetent, he had known that Buffy was so far beyond this young puppy that it was a joke. And when she had stood beside him and quit the Council, even if it had been for Angel's sake, he had been so proud of her, his Buffy, that he thought his heart might burst.

That was how he thought about her. His Buffy.

He loved her. Not as a father, not as a lover, not even as her Watcher. Simply as Giles. He loved her for her strength and her courage, her personality and her heart, even for her faults and failings and always, always for her bright, burning potential.

But she, it seemed, neither needed him nor cared. She had Riley, Willow, Xander, the other young ones her own age. What was he but an old man who had long outstayed his welcome. They had his books, they had a contact number, what else did they need? Certainly not him. He was better going home.

Except...

Home was Sunnydale now. Home was where Buffy was.

He wasn't going home. He was leaving home, heading into an exile that, despite its familiarity, was still exile.

What was a Watcher without his Slayer?

What was Giles without Buffy?

He sighed and picked up the glass, turning it this way and that so that the liquid inside swirled around the edges, still not sure if he was going to drink it or not.

"How could you keep something this important a secret?"

Buffy turned around in the front seat to glare at her best friend, but she sounded much more upset that angry, which made Willow feel even worse.

"He made me promise," she protested in a small voice. "He said there was something he needed to tell me, and then he said it was a secret and I couldn't tell you. But then I knew there was something, so I had to know what the something was, but he made me promise first and..."

"Babbling, Will," Xander offered without taking his eyes off the road. The traffic was steady rather than heavy, but they had merged with the main route up to Los Angeles now and he didn't want any accidents. Especially since Buffy might do him a serious injury in they didn't get to LAX before Giles' plane left.

"Why?" Buffy demanded as Willow trailed off into silence.

"I told you," Willow answered, her voice stronger now. "I promised."

Buffy shook her head impatiently. "No. Why did Giles decide to leave?"

"Oh."

Willow hesitated, not sure how best to answer that question, a hundred possibilities spinning through her head, all designed to soften the blow and make Buffy feel better. But in the end she decided that for once, bluntness was her only option.

"He feels we don't need him anymore," she said simply.

Buffy stared at her, shocked into speechlessness.

"But I do so need him," she exclaimed finally, totally unaware she had shifted the pronoun from plural to singular. "Of course I need him. He's...he's Giles. He's my Watcher."

"Not technically," Xander pointed out as he shifted lanes to pass a slow moving Chevy Chevelle. "He got fired and you quit."

"But..." Buffy began and stopped. Willow could see her looking back over the last eighteen months, stacking the evidence up against herself and finding herself guilty.

"Oh," she said in a very quiet voice. "Oh." She sat back in her seat, a determined look on her face. "Xander, drive faster."

"You gonna drink that?"

Giles looked up into a pair of watchful grey eyes in a heart shaped face, all surrounded by a soft fall silky blonde hair tied loosely with a pale blue scarf.

"Are you going to drink that?" the apparition repeated, sounding vaguely belligerent.

"B-B-Buffy," he finally managed to stammer. "What, what are you doing here?"

"You haven't answered the question," she said flatly.

Giles looked at the still untouched glass of scotch, suddenly finding it totally unappealing. "No," he admitted.

"Good."

Buffy immediately picked up the glass and deposited it on the next table, all in one smooth movement. The young couple sitting at the table in question looked up in annoyance, took one look at the determined expression on her face and went back to whispering sweet nothings at each other without commenting. Buffy ignored them completely, taking the spare chair from Giles' table and turning it around so that she could sit across it with her arms resting on the back.

He still wasn't entirely sure he wasn't dreaming. Perhaps he's swallowed one too many glasses of scotch after all and this was one big, self-deluding hallucination. Buffy was still there, watching him in silence, which was a fairly unusual occurrence and added credence to the hallucination theory.

"What are you doing here?" he managed to ask finally.

"Well, duh!" The look and the tone were totally Buffy and he conceded she really was sitting across the table from him.

"Ah, yes," he agreed weakly.

"Gee, Giles." She shook her head at him. "I go to see my Watcher - to have an important and serious discussion I might add - and all I find is the signs of a hasty departure and a note for Willow."

"I'm not your Watcher anymore," he automatically.

To his surprise, she nodded seriously. "That's what Xander reminded me on the way here. I forget sometimes."

Giles wasn't up to contemplating the ramifications of that second statement; he was still dealing with the first. "Xander's here too?"

"And Willow," Buffy agreed. "She knew where you'd gone and Xander drove us up in Mom's car."

Giles looked around the bar, half expecting an immediate invasion.

"They're parking the car," Buffy explained, answering his unasked question. "They dropped me at the door so I could look for you and went to find a park. They'll be here soon. Or maybe not," she added after a reflective moment. "I looked like they might have a long walk."

"Delayed flights," Giles said. "The numbers of passengers, visitors and cars is starting to build up."

She nodded, as if this was a normal conversation, one about vampires and demons and saving the world. Giles felt that sense of the surreal creeping back up on him.

"Why did you come?"

"Why did you leave me?"

The two questions were asked at exactly the moment, the heart of the matter finally reached.

"You first," Giles offered instinctively, and at his words, Buffy's grip on the back of the chair tightened until the wood was in danger of cracking.

"Why did you leave me?" she repeated.

He tried to sound matter-of-fact and logical, but wasn't sure if he was successful. "Buffy, you've outgrown your need for me. You have another, younger support group. Willow and Tara can do the magic, you can all do the research. I've left my books and I won't send for them until Willow has finished scanning them. You have Riley, you don't need me. It's a teacher's job to make himself redundant, and I'm so proud of you, that you've reached that point."

It was only when he was finished that he remembered, with a growing sense of deadly deja vu, that it was exactly the same technique he had used at the beginning of her Freshman year. She had run away from him then, and the consequences had been disastrous. He hardly dared to look at her, feeling he'd just messed up again. Big time, as she herself might say.

Buffy was staring at him like he'd just gone insane before her eyes. "Giles, that is a load of it," she said flatly. "And you know it."

"No..." he started to protest, but she cut across him easily.

"It is too." Her voice softened, her expression turning usually vulnerable. He realised, suddenly, that he was the only one she let her guard down with enough to let that vulnerability show.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I should have told you, not taken the coward's way out and left a note."

"But you can't leave," she insisted. There was the slightest of shakes in her voice, and he hated himself for causing it. "I can't do it without you, Giles. I've told you that before. Even when I'm being horrible, self-centred Buffy and ignoring you - and I know I did that last year - I still need to know you're there, ready to catch me when I fall, the way you always do." She looked up, her expression rueful. "I guess I need to actually tell you that, huh?"

"Buffy..." He didn't know what to say, the answer man, lost without any answers at all.

Buffy swallowed and managed a smile that almost worked, even if it contained none of her usual brightness. "Do you want to know why I went to see you this morning? I needed to talk to you. I still do. Will you listen?"

"Of course I'll listen." He knew her, knew that whatever it was she had to say, it must be important to bring her to his door, bring her all the was to Los Angeles when she found he wasn't there.

"I..." Buffy hesitated, looking anywhere but at him. "Giles, you haven't been my Watcher for a while. I still think of you as my Watcher, but you haven't been really, have you?"

"Not officially," he agreed, carefully refraining from saying any more than that.

She smiled a little, as if she understood all the things he just hasn't said. "I haven't been training ... and I haven't really need to come to you for help."

"I agree," Giles said quietly, knowing it was her absence that had driven him to be here, sitting in a bar at LAX in the first place.

"Yeah," she agreed, seeming to understand exactly what he was thinking. "And that's why you're here, right? That's the answer to my question. You left me because I was being Independent-Girl and acting like I didn't need you anymore."

"You don't," he answered, and his voice was still quiet, but hope, traitorous hope, was starting to build inside him as he waited to hear what she would say next.

"Well, duh," she said, the derision directed at herself. "Of course I do. And this whole thing with Dracula ... it made me face up to some stuff, realise some stuff." She hesitated, something in her tone making Giles watch her more closely. There was more here than just her and him and there places in each other's lives. There was something deeper and stronger, and he hadn't been there when she needed to talk about it.

Her eyes dropped, studying the stains and gouges on the wooden table. "Ever since we did that spell, the one where we called on the First Slayer, I've been ... um, going out a lot. Every night, actually."

He didn't understand. "Patrolling?"

She shook her head, her gaze still focussed on the table. "Hunting. That's, that's what Dracula called it. And he was right. He understood my power better than I do. He saw darkness in it." She finally looked up at him, her voice dropping even further. "Giles, I can't even sleep if I don't ... kill something."

He wanted to reach out across the table, take her hands in his and tell her he would make it all better. But they had seen too much, been through to much for lies, even comforting ones.

"I need to know more," Buffy continued slowly. "About where I come from, about the other Slayers. I mean, maybe, maybe if I could learn to control this thing, I could be stronger. I could be better. But..." Her expression grew vulnerable again. "Giles, I'm scared. I know it's gonna be hard. And I can't do it without you. I need your help."

He opened his mouth, ready to promise her anything, when she spoke again, and he would have given her the moon and the stars and the sun if he could.

"Giles, I want you to be my Watcher again."

He couldn't help it. This time he did reach across the table, enfolding one of her small hands in his larger ones. He looked at her, unable to speak, all his answers in his eyes.

Buffy smiled and sighed, the small exhalation of air the only sign of how hard it had been for her to make that speech. But he knew, because he knew her.

He smiled. "I guess I'd better go and explain to the airline why I won't be getting on the plane," he said in what he hoped was a light, teasing voice. "Otherwise they might decide to blowup my now-unaccompanied bag on suspicion of being a bomb. I'd hate to lose that wonderful shirt I was forced to borrow from Ethan."

She laughed, just as he intended her to, the clouds lifting from her face. And before either of them quite knew what had happened, they were enfolded in each other's arms, the hug an acknowledgement of mutual need.

"I guess he's coming home with us," a new voice said, and they turned to see Xander and Willow standing there watching, both with delighted smiles on their faces.

All Giles could do was nod.

Yes, he was going home.

He was needed there.

END