By Sauscony
E-mail: sauscony@forty-two.co.nz
Rating: PG
Summary: An alternate ending to Buffy vs. Dracula
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel characters are copyrighted ©20th Century Fox, Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the WB, and are used without permission. No copyright infringment is intended.
"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.
