A bit of Giles point of view. We're beginning to wade into the issues. Part 3 of 4 or 5 in the LA stave of this story.

Buffy floated through her shift in a daze. She screwed up enough orders that Ray, the night cook, snarked at her for making him look bad and then asked if she was alright. She caught Mike as he was leaving for the day and asked to trade shifts so she could have the next day off. Since she'd not yet asked for any sick days, Mike didn't hesitate for long but he looked at her askance as well.

"You okay, Anne? Just yesterday you were asking for extra hours."

"I know, but. I need tomorrow, something's come up."

He studied her hard, making a concerned father face like he used when talking about how his son wanted to learn to skateboard and kept falling down. "Okay, kid, I bet one of the girls is free to step in. You remember what I said though, Ray, Karl and I know how to get pesky guys to go away."

"I'm fine, Mike. Nothing like that," said Buffy, embarrassed but holding her head high so that he'd see she wasn't lying.

She patrolled on her way home, sketching a weaving slalom of a path towards her building. She didn't even think about it, but she did it, keeping her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets, fingers wrapped loose around her stake. Her ears listened for disturbances and so did the sense that was like hearing but wasn't, that lived at the base of her skull. Giles had called it honing years ago, and out loud she called it her spidey sense to make them laugh and think of her less like freak-girl, but inwardly she didn't call it anything. It was too acute and too instinctive to separate out from her regular hearing, tasting self. She listened to a vampire follow her for two blocks. She let it get close, slowing down enticingly, and then darted down an empty side street, stake poised ready. When it chased with the usual eerie growl of the hunt, she caught it and dusted it without even a scuffle. It wasn't the first vampire she'd staked in LA, or even the tenth. It was just as shocking anyhow, a violent intrusion of the strange. Her heart beat so hard that she felt it in her shoulders, her hands. Her mouth tasted of pennies and sour city air.

When she got home, she called Giles at the number he'd given and told him she'd have the whole day free the next day, if he wanted to come by. He offered to take her out to a late lunch somewhere interesting, take advantage of the opportunity to eat somewhere other than one of the five acceptable Sunnydale restaurants was how he phrased it. If she were less bored and half-starved, she would have felt awkward about Giles taking her out when she knew she could only supply the tip at most, but it was too wonderful a suggestion to turn down. Let him be nice to you, she thought, or he's going to smother you with fussing later on.

"I got a vamp on the way home," she told him, neutral and testing. What are you testing, she wondered.

"Are you alright?" Giles asked, casual-worry not panic-worry.

"Yep, just fine. Easy one," Buffy said, suddenly proud her one no fuss kill, as well as the return to the familiar.

When Angelus was on the loose, she had gotten back into the habit of calling Giles after patrol. With so much uncertainty, he had liked to know how she fared and she had liked to know that he was coping well enough at home alone with his ghosts that he could answer the phone and talk calmly and sensibly with her. Some of those conversations had been so brief that an outsider might have found them terse to the point of rudeness. Some of them had stretched aimlessly as she or he had come up with reasons to stay on the line, in order to have a conversation that wasn't mainly false reassurance. In order to have a reason not to turn out the light, give up on the day, and try to decide that it was safe to go to sleep that night.

Though it was a ritual born of an ordeal that lasted only five months, it had become an important signpost in her day. She had felt wholly unable to call him after she'd left, but it had been very strange on those nights when she had patrolled the streets of LA and had come home after, and sat on the side of her bed realizing again that she had only herself to report to.

"Good. Get some rest," he told her kindly, "I'll see you tomorrow."

Giles gave himself a leisurely morning to get his thoughts in order. Without the prod of the school schedule his own circadian rhythm had shifted later and later, especially as he recovered from his injuries. Buffy's innate rhythms as a slayer made her a natural night owl, and if she was working evenings or nights at that diner of hers, it was likely that her own schedule now verged on the nocturnal. They had arranged for him to pick her up at two o'clock, a late lunch hour, but he doubted whether Buffy will have been up long or had breakfast by then. Maybe she would want brunch, he wondered if he ought to skip breakfast as well so as to avoid doubling up- it was bad etiquette, he'd always thought, to eat lunch food across the table from someone eating breakfast, rather stomach turning he'd felt when it was done to him. Then again, he had been drinking heavily in the period of his life when he had frequented cafes with friends, which had likely played a role in this sense of distaste. Or maybe she was already tired of waffles and eggs, no matter how refined the varietal. She would know a place, probably.

She was doing well here, he thought, even better than he'd expected. Much better than he had done when he'd packed his bags and left University. She was clean and fed and sober, and sober-eyed, as well as properly housed. He had a clarion sense of her present position, staring down the world with fierce determination, intent on carving out a small, comfortable bolthole for herself in an uncertain future. He wondered if she had any conception of how remarkable that was, in anyone let alone in a person her age and so recently stricken with grave hurts. He had struggled the night before, after he'd visited her, with shame newly fresh at the shambles he'd made of his youth - and on such thin grounds - when here was this sweet young woman in his charge, who was clearly lost and grieving but still knew that she must protect herself, not tear herself to pieces.

He found had himself thinking a lot about that time lately, far more than he had since the five or so years of steady self flagellation that had immediately followed. His rebellion had lasted well more than two years, and after his prolonged recuperation after Randall's death and his uncle's intervention, he hadn't finished his studies or taken his final exams at Christ Church College until he was 24. There had been another stretch after that, where he had protested to his mother, grandmother and uncle that he was no longer morally or emotionally fitted to take on the role of Watcher, no matter what heritage he was letting down. He had planned to retire to the country and help his grandmother and the farm manager run the estate, and lived a quiet, unthreatening life far from the temptations of magick and blood. His grandmother had been willing to back his refusal, and his plan, not at all eager to see her only grandson at the front lines of the War. But she had worried that he would have regrets later in the cloistered scholar's life he'd proposed, that he had wasted his talent and his birthright, spent them on the poison of guilt. She had given him her own diaries to read from her time as Watcher and guardian to the Slayer Dorothea Stott. He only had to read one of them before he reported to the Academy.

By that time he was three or four years older than the rest of his class of Watchers in Training, and even older than those who joined up without University degrees on the strength of their names and exams alone. Combined with the burden of his rebellion and recovery, he found himself by those small margins alone surprisingly isolated from his peers.

Buffy did not have years to indulge as he had. He had been angry and frightened, weak to temptation, and overwhelmingly ambitious when he realized what pleasure and command his power could give him. Thankfully, he did not see in his Slayer the same taste for reckless abandon, or for trying to seize in kind what compensation she was owed for her suffering.

For someone so independent and possessed of such strong opinions in some areas of her life, she was startlingly ruthless at subduing herself to outwardly thankless and grueling situations. The way she was treated by her fellow students, the boiled pottage of American public approved imitation academics served up in her classes, which she bore with cheerful grumbling and seemingly no awareness that other students in other places received better. The way she made infinite allowances for her friends' teasing and their at times hurtful willful cheer and bewilderment in the face of her responsibilities. The way she bore her mother's treatment with only small outbursts of frustration or rebellion.

He remembered a time or two when Buffy came back to their library to continue preparations of some kind after a fight with her mother. She hadn't been angry, but quiet and still in a way that was unnatural to her. Shell shocked, perhaps, or so deeply shored up against judgement that he had no sense of what she was feeling. He had asked what was wrong, picked gently for details, but he had been rebuffed with a half mumbled complaint and blank, lost look in her eye that frightened him. Joyce was a difficult woman, he'd found, who could be cold and punitive, even in her fury, even those moments when he expected a mother to be proud.

He had met with Joyce several times over the long summer and had come to know her better, though not understand her. He had previously been confounded at the apparent rift between mother and daughter, Buffy being such a warm, patient, true hearted girl and Joyce always seeming so kindly and smiling. He could see it more clearly now, had seen stark and unpleasant sides of his Slayer's mother that the woman would surely have never let him see if he had not fallen so far from her good opinion. He was glad to have seen glimpses of that aspect of what Buffy faced, but he worried. They would be going back to Sunnydale eventually. No matter what Buffy pretended to herself in the meantime, he knew that she was eaten away by the sense of duty unattended there and would lead them back before long. The tenuous peace and the veneer of the ordinary Buffy had lived in before the terrible crisis last May depended largely on her security in her mother's house. Now the Summers mother and daughter faced each other in a conflict immense and minute, complex and largely opaque to him and well beyond his comfortable province of understanding. Facilitating a reconciliation would inevitably fall to him, and he didn't mind the burden but at the prospect he felt so wildly out of his depth, and also aware he was nearly as implicated in the conflict as Buffy and Joyce. And he was biased, of course, deeply, irrevocably biased, that was as it should be, he knew, but he knew it might lead him towards blundering missteps.

He didn't know if she wanted that buffer of normalcy back, but he remembered how much, how violently he had craved the small comforts and routines of his own childhood and the presence figures therein once he was sober and coherent enough to begin to rebuild. He'd been lucky, he had come to grips with that recently. Even after he had behaved so badly, Uncle Magnus had made sure that he stayed clear of the courts and the law, that all doors remained open to him, had been disappointed and grim-faced but infinitely patient. His mother and grandmother Adela had been frustrated and sad but kind, so very kind. They had hovered around him and treated him gently, doting and worrying over him like he was once again the boy they had sent off to school at age eleven, all three of them guilty and grieving and trying to make up for what had been lost. His family had kept for him a wellspring of love and forgiveness, he had not been turned out for his sins and left to fend for himself, even though such treatment would have been well justified.

No, he didn't understand Joyce Summers, gifted as she was with such a remarkable daughter. Giles wasn't sure that he wanted to. All he could do was to support Buffy in this time of crossroads, as she had so aptly put it, and try to follow her lead.

The unending warm weather and dry air of southern California unnerved him, especially as the world turned its head away from the sun and the skies out to be drawing in around them, wooly, wet and dim. It made it simple to pack, though, and simple to dress. He readied himself with deliberation, still eschewing the uniform of the Librarian with it's appearance of authority but then again something nicer than the ratty old fleece he'd worn for a comfortable drive down. He wanted to look like presentable, unobjectionable company for Buffy.

She never seemed to be aware of the possible appearances of the two of them together, she, a sweet, vibrant young thing, and he, a tall, awkward man rapidly and regretfully approaching a certain age. Though everything between them was as honorable and respectful as he knew how to be, though he regarded her as friend and held for her the esteem of a doting mentor for his fiercely talented charge, Giles knew that the company they kept might very well look like something else to outsiders. At least here in the city they were anonymous, not the moderately infamous figures they were in Sunnydale.

Giles made it from his drab business hotel to Buffy's apartment building without the aid of the crystal pendulum and locator spell this time, after a few false starts. LA traffic was as vile as he'd always heard it was, but it was vile in a different way than London, a wholly different rhythm. It wasn't a nice neighborhood, and even with her special talents he didn't like to think of her walking around there by herself late at night. He wondered if it might be better to find different accommodations, nearer to where Buffy was living, just in case (in case of what, he didn't like to think). Then again she might not want to feel hovered over. He would ask later, if he remembered.

He took a few moments at Buffy's chalk-blue painted door to compose himself and order his thoughts, had been trying to all through getting ready, all the way across town, but they would not order. She answered quickly, apartment so small after all she could not have been so far away, and drew him in with a small, quiet smile and a light hand on his wrist. Her studio was on the corner of the fifth floor, windows on two walls and above the roofline of some of the next door buildings, so his first impression of the place today was a fullness of warm, yellow light billowing in through thin white curtains. The air smelled cold, and clean, like citrus, a welcome change from the musty stairwell.

Buffy closed the door behind him, and then surprised him with a swift and rib-binding embrace, her small strong hands digging in against his back, her face against his shoulder and hiding there - his hands fluttered uncertainly for a moment before they settled, she did not often ask for this. He felt her breath roughly, and then she was away, at arm's length. He looked down at his hands, still settled at her shoulders, almost drew her back again but it seemed too much to ask. How tiny she was, just a small slip of a girl, he didn't ignore this about her but so often her energy, her vividness, the bright force of her will outpaced small fineness of her, but last night, today, much of the brightness seemed drained away, or compressed inside all furled. He gripped her shoulders hard and let her go. Her eyes, when they met his, looked large and wet and lost, but he watched her compose herself and smile for him again.

"Hi," she said, chagrined, "Sorry, it's been… I don't know. Too much time to think this morning, I guess. I started to wonder if I'd imagined your visit yesterday. Too good to be true."

"Oh, Buffy," he said, throat thick with guilt, "Should I have come to find you sooner? I thought you were reasonably contented here."

She shrugged expressively, familiar a gesture of body and face, as if to say what do I know, I just work here? "I needed the space from everything. And obviously, it's not like I'm ready to go back even now. And I do kinda like what I've got going. But… it's like, suddenly it's starting to feel real that I left. I left you. I left everything. How did I do that?" She shook her head, looking bewildered.

"Hmm. It's a strange feeling, looking back at what you've done in the grips of extremity," he said, following her to the little patch of kitchen, coming to lean lightly against the short stretch of counter between fridge and sink. "Like someone's shuffled you onto a train while you were half-asleep and sent you off, and you've woken up elsewhere with no clear idea of how or why."

"Yeah," she agreed with surprised vehemence, turning to face him so quickly her ponytail swung. "Yeah, exactly. And you're both the shuffler and the shuffle-ee. Ugh, it's such a weird feeling. But I swear I'm not going nuts."

"Of course you're not. Or no more than you ought to be in the situation we're in. I'd be far more worried if hadn't reacted at all."

"I guess so," she agreed and then peered up at him in assessment and sympathy, "You summarize the weirdness from experience, don't you?"

"Yes, well… yes. After what you're thinking of, but before it too. How I came to be where I was, when. And the worst, not the worst part of course," he corrected with a wince, thinking back to that which had been incalculably worse, always, but then again strangely easier to communicate, "but the most galling part was how everyone would ask 'but why did you?' and I didn't have anything coherent to tell them. Mostly nothing at all to tell them, in fact."

"Well. I won't ask if you don't," Buffy offered, half in jest, but clearly still with some earnest nerves.

"I don't mind talking about my past with you, Buffy," he offered gently, "But remember what I said yesterday, I'll not ask if that's what you'd prefer."

"Okay. That's good," she said, her mood lightening, turning self deprecating, "because all you'd get right not is an 'I don't know.'"

"What about if I asked you what you want to do for lunch instead?"

"Oh, whoops, lunch! I forgot we were going to go out and jumped straight in with the heavy stuff." She laughed, made a little face. She was more animated than she'd been the night before, he breathed a little easier to see her more present in her own skin.

"To be honest, that's an I don't know, too. I haven't been eating out much, except at the diner. A lot of the restaurants in this neighborhood seem kinda…. Grotty."

"I have the car," he said, "Let's go a little farther afield then, find something nice."

They ended up at a dim and surprisingly capacious chinese restaurant where the english on the menus was scanty (Giles was no help with the Mandarin, most of the near dozen languages he could read were not still in use by modern people) but the food was wonderful. Buffy told him all about Zosia and Marlene, Mike, gregarious Ray, and Karl the inordinately bashful day cook. She talked about how funny it was spending time with people so stolidly normal, who lived with unstudied ignorance. Not like in Sunnydale where the people who didn't know had to be carefully blinding themselves to it, these were people whose lives were utterly untouched by the night.

"Like being a spy in their midst, or something," she said.

In turn Giles told her some about his turns in graduate programs, his work among researchers and academics and collectors at the museum. There had been people he'd known there who knew in oblique ways about the other, the more real work, but to them it had been myth and fairytale, stupid superstition to be laughed off. There had been whole periods of his life, sometimes clutches of years at a time, he reflected, when he'd been expected to live on the surface and pretend that that was all that there was.

"Of course we're all required to stay current, stay fit, and keep up with the rota for fieldwork. But there were times I had to let it all fade into the background. I don't know that compartmentalization is healthy but it's better than getting paralyzed by cognitive dissonance."

"I have a hard time not obsessing," she confessed, stirring the ice at the bottom her glass with her straw, "about all of it. I mean, not just since last Spring, but since the beginning. Yeah, in a lot of ways it's become status quo, now, but I keep getting the feeling that my perspective on regular people things and normal points of reference has been permanently warped."

She needed coping mechanisms, he thought, but he didn't know what to suggest. He'd never been one much for coping either, just obstinacy and denial and liberal applications of guilt. He wanted Buffy to find something better, but lately it had become more and more clear to him that he was lost and weak as well, not the wise and knowing avatar of purpose he was meant to be. His sense of direction, or of self preservation, had never been very strong.

"The Council oughtta keep some therapists on staff," she said, "You try to talk about the mystical grabbag of pain we deal with to the regular kind and things get ugly, but I can't imagine that anyone in the business really comes out unscathed."

"They do employ some, after a fashion," he admitted with a wry, wincing recollection stern-faced advisors with their nebulous disapproval and their papery sympathy. They always had a way of making him feel a shamefaced child, caught breaking half understood rules. "However, I don't think you'd like them very much."

"No, I think probably not," she said with a bitter laugh.

He paid the bill while she boxed up the remaining dumplings from their over-eager array of sampling. Sunnydale didn't have such a thing as an authentic chinese restaurant, let alone one that served a dim sum lunch.

He insisted she take the leftovers, reminding her that he was in a hotel for the duration. She accepted graciously, but with a smile that said she was onto him. He wondered if she would allow him to give her grocery money, or if she would find it too intrusive a step from someone in his position - an adult, a mentor, someone who could have too much power over her. It was his purpose to be the Slayer's bank of resources, and that meant keeping her healthy as much as anything, but he'd always sensed her discomfort with that idea. She was a contradictory girl, generous with her time and affection and care, but downright miserly when it came to accepting the same from others.

He promised that they would speak again soon, and they parted ways. After he left her at her apartment building, Giles noticed that they had managed to avoid talking about the future entirely.

They met again the next night after her shift. He met her in front of the diner, as arranged, though Buffy seemed briefly startled to see him there. She wore a dark blue coat over a white and red uniform, both a bit too big on her.

She looked tired, he thought. He realized, as she stepped into the uneven spill of sodium lamplight and looked up at him, that her face had changed in the months she'd been away. Just slightly, but enough to notice, as though her features had become more resolved, her gaze more clear and canny. As though more of her girlhood had been pared away. He knew that every youth must go through it, the most archetypal story was the coming of age. But in Buffy's case the walk from childhood had been a forced march, and the lessons along that road had been meted out with unjust viciousness. He looked away.

Giles walked beside her on a vague patrol, a half step behind, letting her lead. They passed the occasional homeless person whiling the night, or partier heading home, were passed by cars. Buffy was recognizably on alert but they came across nothing out of the ordinary. No inhuman creatures of the night.

Giles told her that he had spoken with her mother, more than once. That he had seen the note that she had left. That Joyce was angry and worried and deeply conflicted. That he understood now why Buffy had waited until it was unavoidable to tell her mother the truth of her Calling.

"But you said it had to be a secret," she protested, all aggressive guilelessness.

"Really, and you've always done just as I've requested, down to the very letter, yes?" he drawled.

She laughed, turned to look at him in easy acknowledgement, yeah, okay, you got me. "I do exactly what you ask when I agree it's the right thing, I don't do that for just anybody, you know," she joked, teasing them both.

"Yes, of course. And that's why I thought you would tell her before a month had passed after your arrival."

"Looking at Willow and Xander, I see how you could think that, but. The first time I tried that, it did not go great. She told you her version of that, right? The version where she's brave and guilty and oh so justified?"

"I… yes, something along those lines. I'm sorry that you went through that, Buffy. I hadn't realized…"

"No, well, would you advertise it around that you'd been psych hold kid? And then after the doctors told them I was 'just acting out to get their attention,' they were really sorry, but they also never wanted to talk about it. At all. We didn't deal with it. The only thing I could do was pretend it hadn't happened."

"For what it's worth, I think your mother regrets very profoundly that she didn't believe you," he said, trying to reassure. So much evidence in front of her for so long though, and seemingly a poor grasp of her own daughter's character. Denial was an ugly thing. "Not that that takes away your right to feel hurt and angry, or makes what happened any less."

"It's not like I can blame her. I live with it all the time and sometimes even I… Anyway, there's been a dozen horrible things since then, and then some. I think I have to call it water under the bridge for Calamity Buffy," she said bravely. Then after a long pause, as they crossed the street and peered down another empty alley, she spoke again in a much smaller voice.

"Does she really believe it this time? Is it sticking? Because I thought I'd gotten through to her that parents visit night when Spike and his gang attacked, but. Nope."

"Yes, having had a number of talks with her this summer, I'm… reasonably certain that has faced up to realities."

"And she hates us for it, right?"

"She doesn't hate you. She is very upset, and I won't lie, things there are likely to be very difficult, but you cannot believe that hate is at the root of it."

"No, I know. I was talking hyperbolical hate, Giles."

"I do think she may very truly hate me, though," he complained with theatrically wounded pride, and she laughed, as he had hoped.

"I don't know though," Buffy admitted later, coming back to the subject. They were paused in the coral tiled vestibule while she found the key to her building's lobby (she hadn't asked how he'd gotten in that first night without being buzzed in, but then she'd seen him get past locked doors before) to let them in. "I don't think that's really why I didn't."

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't tell my mom about the big destiny thing. Not that she wouldn't have believed me, because if I'd really wanted to convince her, I could have done some stupid feat of strength or taken her on patrol or something. But she could have made the slayer stuff even more complicated. She would have tried to micromanage that, too, like she did with school and friends and skating or whatever. And she just kept assuming I'd gone stupid and shallow and boy crazy, which. Kinda turns out she was more right that I thought."

"That's simply not true, Buffy. Perhaps you were too trusting, but not-"

She made a dismissive noise and waved him off. "Not the point. The truth is, I knew that I was doing this special, important thing, that I was being responsible. And I got to thinking, well, if she can't see how hard I'm working to keep it all together, then maybe she deserved to go on assuming I was some kind of flighty airhead."

He stopped below her on the stairs as she carried on, struck by how bitter she sounded, how sad and young and defensive. What a miserable, protracted, needling battle of wills it could be between mother and daughter when things went wrong. His heart squeezed in sympathy.

"Buffy, that's…"

"Nice, huh," she said, viciously sarcastic, "God, no wonder she doesn't trust me."

"It was an impossible situation," he said, which sounded a stupid, hollow platitude in his ear. He hurried to catch up to her again, trying to think of something reassuring, something to leaver off some of the blame she wanted to lay on her own shoulders. "It's a parent's job to be supportive, to try to understand their child even when that child is making choices they don't like."

This appeared to make no impact with Buffy. She simply bowed her head and carried on. He bore responsibility here too, he realized, he ought to have forced the issue months or even years back. He should have seen that leaving Joyce in the dark for so long would have ugly consequences, or that Buffy's avoidance of the issue grew from something more deep-rooted and tangled than a child's impulse of secret keeping. What did he know about modern American parenting? Or about parents and teenagers, full stop? He who had been sent away to Crawford, to be prepared for University and Watcherhood, where he'd been minded loosely by Prefects and Head Boys and Professors, whose methods he'd found himself unconsciously emulating with Buffy and her friends - not the same thing at all. He should not have assumed.

"I'm sorry," Giles said simply, and touched her shoulder in sympathy. This at least she didn't shrug off.