Then again, 'Old Predictable' wasn't supposed to arrive to pick her up for an assignment like this, dressed like...well...and with the sword and all. It gave her a sense of deja vu, which she only placed very near the time of their arrival at the ranch. He was giving off the same vibes and doing very much the same things to her insides as he did when he suddenly appeared to save the day against Evil Willow.

Then, however, there had been far too much happening to take notice of flip-flopping insides and later, way too much baggage being carried to actually *deal* with something that far out of left field. Instead, she'd done what she always did with 'too hard' items. She'd ignored it completely.

Colour rushed into her face as she watched him hunker down to study something, probably tracks, or maybe blood on the remnants of bushes poking through the snow. Titan was dancing more than a little and annoying Jasper, but her eyes were fixed on the figure whose head was bent in concentration and who'd never seemed more alive and more real to her than he did right now. She had no excuses for her behaviour over the last, very long, while, only the knowledge that falling apart was not a good look for her. On top of everything else it had coloured her once pretty good judgment and made her needy and dependent when she should have been standing on her own two feet.

She shuddered at the realization that she had arrived at Sunnydale High with more control over her own life, more courage in her own choices...and far more self-respect, than she'd seen or felt at any time in the last few years. She didn't like who she'd become and she knew Giles hadn't liked what he saw when he came back to fight the First. She wondered fleetingly if she could blame the majority of her erratic behaviour on his absence and reluctantly dismissed the notion. She had tried that before...even out loud...and it had sounded as much like a copout then as it did now, inside her head. His ill-conceived departure certainly didn't help anything, either time, but there was no point in blaming others, especially him, for her choices or her right turn deep into total loser-being. Buffy un-scrunched her brow and scanned around slightly frantically.

While she was lost in thought, Giles had disappeared, or more likely just moved out of sight. At that moment she shuddered violently and Titan whinnied and jibbed sideways, causing Buffy to drag Jasper with them. It took a couple of minutes to settle the horses and Buffy gave thanks for the running martingale Giles had insisted on, though she didn't actually know what it was called, only that it stopped Titan from throwing his head up and hi-tailing it back to the ranch. Whatever had made her shudder had totally spooked the horses, particularly hers. She could feel him beneath her, like a coiled watch-spring, ready to 'unsproing' at the first opportunity.

She didn't know whether to call out Giles' name and alert whatever else might be in the area that she was there, or to dismount and search for him on foot, or take the horses in some arbitrary direction and search for him on horseback. A moment later the decision was made for her. Another shudder was immediately followed, spookily like lightning and thunder, by a prolonged, high-pitched yowl halfway between a scream of terror and a climbing shriek of rage.

Buffy turned the horses toward the noise and picked her way through the trees, despite Titan telegraphing, in no uncertain terms, both his terror and his desire to go in the opposite direction. As she got closer, her Slayer senses took over and she began tracking instinctively toward the source of that noise. When they finally broke into another clearing, Titan reared, snapping the martingale and screaming his own scream of fear. Only Buffy's slayer strength and will brought the animal down again. Jasper was also pulling hard. When the chance presented itself, Buffy dismounted and again had to use all her strength to hold both horses long enough to close-tie them to a tree, figuring that the less rein they had to jerk on, the less likely they were to break them.

With all the weapons she could carry and still fight, she turned again, unerringly, toward the presence.

Beyond the clearing was a crop of granite boulders. When Buffy worked her way around them, ploughing through sometimes quite deep snow, she found Giles, sword held in front of him, poised to defend himself from attack, and a creature that reminded her of some types of werewolf, but far more terrifying. Her skin was crawling with the level of almost palpable malevolence and the overwhelming sense of its sentience, whereas the average metamorphosed werewolf was no more self-aware than a wild dog or a bear.

It paused in its stalking of the Watcher and turned very slowly to look directly at her.

Buffy shuddered then realized that Giles had seen her as well. Taking advantage of the Mordredi's momentary distraction, he rushed forward, intending to decapitate the creature, but it seemed to know even before he moved that he was going to, and in one lightning fast move, had Giles pinned to the ground, his sword spinning out of his hand. It turned its head again, as though daring Buffy to try to save her companion.

Whilst not sure anything she did wouldn't get Giles killed, Buffy knew she had to do something. Giles had said they were intelligent. She walked forward slowly, hand in her pocket, wrapped around a stake.

"Giles says you're smart; so you can probably understand me. Do you know who I am? Who he is? You kill him, you have to deal with me."

The beast threw its head up and snorted through expressive nostrils. It didn't really need to speak. Its expressive eyes asked the question and somehow Buffy understood it. She suspected that it was more than a little psychic, but wasn't really sure, since it wasn't like it was projecting words or pictures into her brain or anything.

"He's mine," she confirmed. "And I'm the Slayer. You know...the pesky *Chosen One*" or one of them at least, she added silently. "You hurt him, you deal with me...and I figure you know how much trouble that's gonna be. Up to now you guys have only killed livestock. If you let Giles go as a show of good faith that you're not gonna start vivisecting people, we don't have to take this any further, right?"

The air suddenly turned a translucent violet colour for a moment. Buffy blinked and then blinked again. Where the lupine creature had been standing on Giles, there now stood a bipedal figure, naked as the day it was born. She tried to ignore its prominent 'endowment' and kept her eyes locked with the emerald green ones that were staring at her, almost mesmerically.

"Why should I give you this kill?" It hissed. "No Slayer has ever killed one of the Mordr'dii."

Buffy rolled her eyes. "I'm guessing that's because no Slayer ever had to fight one of you before," she retorted. "Are you sure you really want to see what you're missing? Wouldn't it be easier to just let him go and consider it even?"

The demon snarled. "Why don't I tear out his life and then we will fight?" It spat back.

Her spirits fell, but she kept the scowl on her face, though she couldn't resist flicking a glance down to see how Giles was doing, in spite of herself. He was in pain, but mouthing something. Her lip reading sucked majorly, but she thought he was saying something about blood.

Buffy's eyes flicked back to the Mordredi. Blood...these things thrived on the kill, on death. Maybe the smell of blood would make it come after her...

Swiftly, she pulled out the boot-knife Giles had given her for the trip and cut her palm, turned her hand over and let the drops of blood fall onto the snow, where they quickly stained the pristine whiteness.

The bipedal being, almost reptilian in appearance, quivered, its large nostrils dilating even further. Then, suddenly, it was leaping away from Giles, a quadruped again and a slavering, noisy one at that. Buffy backed away swiftly, fishing out a stake, so that she was armed with both it and the hunting knife. She evaded the creature's first attack easily, using Slayer speed to leap sideways when it sprang at her. The second time she avoided the teeth and claws with her Slayer speed and agility, the Mordredi howled with rage. It did not, however, react irrationally or throw itself blindly at her, as many of her other adversaries had in the past.

Instead it watched as she automatically looked toward Giles during the lull to see if he was okay, and in that split second made a superhuman leap to crush her to the ground. At which point Buffy discovered that leaping wasn't the only superhuman thing about it...

Giles, who had managed to get to his feet and retrieve his sword, despite some fairly extensive bruising, felt his heart smash against his chest when he saw her go down, before adrenaline and training took over.

Buffy screamed as teeth as sharp as needles tore into her shoulder, partly in mortal horror that it was actually going to kill her and partly in excruciating pain...then screamed again when a blade flashed in the sun once, and it was the creature's turn to scream. A sound that went right through the body...before the sword flashed again and its head rolled off, landing with a squelching noise, and despoiling the white blanket beneath it.

She looked over the shoulder of the gruesome, still upright, semi-eviscerated corpse and sobbed. Giles was still standing in the finish position of the final stroke, eyes wide with pain and concentration. Then he blinked, dropped the sword and kicked the body out of the way before swooping down and folding her in his arms.

"I thought I'd lost you," he said raggedly, brushing the hair from her eyes and studying the torn flesh of the bite wound at the same time. "It's not too deep. You should be healed by morning, but it's going to be painful for a while."

"I figured," she said weakly, but in good humour, and tilted her head towards the corpse. "Not exactly big with the dental hygiene...and it kinda stings: like there's some kind of toxin, or something..."

"Nothing fatal," Giles reassured her quickly, "but yes, its incisors carry a toxin meant to have a paralysing effect on the demon species the Mordredii were actually evolved to hunt. It has very little effect on animals or people in this dimension."

Buffy rested her head against Giles' chest, struggling with the pain, but aware that she was way more focused on the feel of his arms around her, the familiar scent of him mixed with that of exertion, and, it had to be said, the background pall of warm demon guts, than on the discomfort. The pain didn't matter. What mattered was that his chest was as warm and solid as the arms that were holding her so possessively, and that for the first time since he'd left her, she felt safe, and protected and...loved.

He looked down at the fair head, then bent his own to rest his face against her crown. "I thought I'd lost you again," he whispered again, tremulously.

She tightened the hold of the arm she'd curled around his waist then shifted so that she could look up at him. There were things that needed to be said, things both of them had been avoiding for a long time. This was probably not the time, but then...when had it ever been the *right* time with them?

"I thought I'd lost you a long time ago," she managed equally as tremulously, surprised at her own temerity. "And then I lost me too. Conclusion: without you there is no 'me'. There's someone who looks like me and sounds like me...but, God, is she a moron...no taste, no sense..." Her voice almost disappeared. "...No feeling..."

Giles' voice was haunted. "I'd give anything to have done things differently. I was so certain that I was doing what was best...and I was so terribly mistaken."

Buffy shook her head against him. "Not really," she conceded. "I was kinda pathetic and needy and I was leaning all over you, all in the worst way...and I'm not so stupid that I don't know as well as you do that that state of affairs wasn't going to stop any time soon. I..." She lifted her head and met his eyes, aware that it was way past time. Time for not running away...for the truth. "I just needed you not to go. I just...*needed you*, Giles."

The words were said quietly enough, but every syllable shouted at him. He closed his eyes for a moment, unable to look into her eyes and to think at the same time. When he spoke again it was without opening them. His reply was slow and measured, but it spoke of years of hurt and his tone was also one of 'now or never'.

"Y-you've 'needed' me almost from the moment we started working together, and yet for almost that same length of time you've been more than capable of making choices and decisions quite without my input or support, in fact often in defiance of my opinion, and even of my direct instructions. I've never wanted to be anywhere but at your side, where I belong, where I was destined to be...but you've never truly 'needed' me, Buffy. I was never really more than an indulgence...used by necessity or whim, and in recent times cast aside more often than not."

Buffy had lost all colour and her hands shook. "Giles, look at me," she demanded.

He opened his eyes again and drew a sharp breath at the stark paleness and the moisture glittering in her eyes.

"I won't defend myself to you." She pulled herself from his embrace and sat up painfully before finding his gaze again. "You already know it all, anyway. You know me better than I do; you know what I am...that I'm flawed...maybe more than most...so it's no surprise that Buffy makes mistakes...a lotta mistakes, and sometimes really bad ones. But one thing I was never mistaken about was how much I needed you...I didn't know how to put it into words back then, but you...you're a part of me...and I think I'm part of you. All I know is when you're not there, I'm not whole. I came back broken...but when you left, what was left of me got smashed into little pieces I couldn't put back together again by myself."

"And *I* won't apologise for doing what I thought was best," he said too roughly. "I never meant to hurt you, but I had to do something. Rightly or wrongly, I chose to give you a chance to stand on your own two feet. In that time you always had a choice...I did not make you choose to do what you did or to become what you became after I left."

The truth hurt. Stung by it, Buffy scrambled to her feet, ignoring the unpleasantness of both the throbbing pain in her lacerated arm and the delayed reaction to previous events. It was also suddenly very lonely by herself.

"I didn't choose to die," she retorted, "or to be dragged back." She turned on her heel and attempted to storm off, but the effect was more like brisk teetering. By the time Giles realized that she wasn't going to turn, she'd disappeared into the trees. He went after her, catching up just in time to see her turn Titan toward home. Except that without the martingale, the highly agitated Titan, probably provoked by the rather overpowering smell of demon innards, was able to throw his magnificent head up and bolt with the virtually one-armed Buffy before she could even gather her wits.

In seconds Giles was on the grey, bent low and putting heel hard to the muscled flanks. The powerful old gelding responded magnificently, stretching out as it emerged from the tree line, its wide, mustang hooves barely hindered by the snow. Giles urged it on as they closed on the fleeing warm-blood now that Buffy was fighting it, snow spraying in all directions. He was within about ten metres when he saw it.

Buffy was too preoccupied with her own battle to see or hear the danger poised to strike ahead of her.

Giles loosened the reins, giving the grey its head, drew his sword from the sheath on his back and leaned down close to the horse's neck, weapon poised to strike as they thundered along.

When the second Mordredi screeched, Titan made Buffy's struggles academic by rearing up almost vertically. Unprepared, she slithered unwillingly off his back and landed with an undignified, but undramatic, thump in the wet snow...somewhere she didn't stay for more than a few seconds, scrambling to her feet, ignoring her bruised and very wet butt and agonised, and now heavily bleeding, shoulder.

She faced the creature, which was stalking purposefully towards her, then looked up when the pounding of Jasper's hooves heralded Giles' approach. The Mordredi paused too, turning its head, almost curiously, toward the sound.

And then everything seemed to move in slow motion. The creature turned back to Buffy, who was staring opened mouth at the military-style charge of the man she...the man who'd always been at the centre of her universe, and resumed its careful stalking of her.

Clutching a stake in her good arm, Buffy prayed that the demon, in quadruped form, would remain fixated by the volume of blood soaking her clothes and trickling down her arm and chest.

It sprang.

Buffy raised her good arm.

Jasper swept in and Giles leaned outward, his blade flashing as it described a powerful arc.

The Mordredi screamed a blood-curdling scream.

Buffy heard the same 'plopping' sound and knew that she was safe again without looking at the gruesome remnants of Giles' attack.

Giles, on the other hand, had not slowed, instead setting Jasper to continue after the chestnut, obviously intent on stopping the valuable animal from hurting itself. She watched the pair continue down the slope and streak across the lower meadow, apprehending a blowing Titan with the same impressive elegance as the previous attack. Giles rode as though he were a part of his mount...literally a fusion of horse and rider that was beautiful in its purity and its truth.

Within minutes they had passed, and rounded Titan up to a scrambling halt, turning him in a tight circle with Jasper's body so that the animal perforce had to slow and the Watcher was able to lean down almost trick-rider fashion and secure a wildly, and dangerously, trailing rein to take the animal into custody.

End part 2