Not At All, C/A Future Fic
Chapter One
It is all happening too fast. One moment fighting off your average vampire thugs, the next huddled in a boxcar barreling through the moors of northern England, bound for a medieval castle in Scotland. A castle she has sworn she would never enter. A castle she tries so hard to forget exists.
But it’s her last resort, her last refuge. Bella lays unconscious in her lap, pulse thready, breathing sporadic. Her hands are sticky with the child’s blood, which has finally slowed in flowing from the twin puncture wounds in her neck, the gash on her forehead, the stab wound in her abdomen. The girl’s right arm falls at an unnatural angle. Henry crouches just inside the open door of the train car, stung by the downpour and staring, unseeing, at the damp, dark land racing by. Those eyes that, in spite of everything he’s seen, are usually so young and bright are now dull and broken.
And suddenly she is so very tired. So tired of running and hiding with two children who have never met a stranger and yet never had a friend. Living from motel to motel, hostel to hostel, all across the globe. New York, Prague, Rome, Istanbul, Shanghai, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo… They all blur together. This isn’t how she had planned to see the world. You know, back when she had been alive.
Anyway, don’t you think the Powers that Be could splurge a little when it came to accommodations? Especially considering how much they wanted these two miracle children alive…
***
“Another spotting of agents from Wolfram & Hart, the Xui Syndicate, the Afolabi crime organization, ‘Abd al-Hamid’s men, and La Familia Rojas. This time in London,” Giles announces to the gathered “inner circle”, an expanded version of what had once been the Scoobies. That name died off so long ago.
Angel hates moments like these, when Giles sounds so much like Wesley that the past ten years melt away. He rubs the headache away from the bridge of his nose, hoping that his memories of the former Watcher will leave with it.
“They’re getting closer,” Buffy speaks up from beside Angel.
“Occult mafias from almost every continent,” Xander observes from the other side of the room, adjusting his eye patch and studying the projected map, which plots the reported sightings across the globe. Removing his hand from Dawn’s knee, he pauses before adding, “They’re tracking something.”
Dammit, when did Xander Harris get so damn observant? And when did I lose the urge to growl at him and Dawn? Angel thinks, returning his attention to the map.
“They’re getting more frequent. Whatever they’re tracking is on the move,” Angel says, surprised at how rough his voice has become.
“We’ve been getting these reports for a decade now,” Kennedy offers, “But never all five in the same place, all in a row.”
“Until three months ago,” Willow pipes up from beside her.
“So they’re getting closer to their goal,” Andrew says, standing and moving to the map. “They all met up in St. Petersburg in February. That’s our first reported sighting of all five groups. Their quarry must be pretty desperate to go to Russia in the winter. Like Napoleon and Hitler.”
Giles has the grace roll his eyes at Andrew’s last comment. No matter how much Andrew changes, his moments of nerd-dom still abound.
“So the question remains, what exactly are they hunting?” Giles asks, surveying the room. They are no longer the children he met on the Hellmouth. Even young Dawn is growing close to thirty. Their eyes are all haunted, their moments of joy few and far between. So much responsibility on all of these shoulders.
Xander gives a yelp before sheepishly realizing it’s his cell phone vibrating against his thigh. He answers it shortly, his eyes widening as he listens.
“What do the psychics say?” he demands. “A Higher Being?! Give us a visual.”
The screen changes to one of the cameras on the outside walls of the castle, the one angled at the front door.
“Maybe that’s what they’re hunting,” Dawn suggests as the camera zooms in and focuses. Three figures come into view, a small boy and a woman carrying a severely injured little girl in her arms. All three figures are haggard, but as the zoom closes in on the face of the woman, a collective gasp echoes through the room.
“Oh my God,” Buffy manages.
Angel bursts out of the room, Buffy quick at his heels. “Angel, wait…”
“What?” Kennedy asks, staring at the woman on the screen. She turns to Willow. “Who is that?”
The witch’s eyes are haunted as she answers.
“Cordelia.”
***
Angel tears through the hallways of the castle, ignoring curious Slayers, witches, and Watchers, bowling them over. His mind is singularly focused on meeting whatever is out there and strangling it slowly and brutally for daring to wear his Cordelia’s face. That’s already happened once, and his heart can’t break into any more pieces, even if it doesn’t beat.
“Angel, wait…” Buffy repeats, close at his heels. “We don’t know who or what is out there. If they’re on our side or not…”
Angel turns on her, eyes yellow in rage. “I don’t give a damn who’s side it’s on, Buffy. Nothing has a right to that face…”
Buffy’s eyes are sympathetic, her words soft as she tries to calm him. “I know, Angel, I know. I’m just asking you to think a little before…”
“What if it were Spike’s face?” Angel bites out.
Buffy’s face clouds, and she takes a step back.
Angel turns again, headed for the door. Buffy takes a few moments to recover before following Angel.
The ensouled vampire pushes past the Slayers on guard at the door and swings it open. Looking into those eyes is like being slammed with a sledgehammer. He freezes, the anger draining from him. It’s her. He can feel it. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. He will never forget those eyes.
“Angel…” she whimpers, soaked and exhausted and worried sick. Her knees are shaking, ready to collapse from the emotion. “Help… please…”
When he goes to catch her, he instead finds the small body in her arms pushed into his, her eyes pleading.
“You’re dead,” he manages, dorkily.
“Yeah,” Cordelia admits with a weak smile, leaning on the boy at her side to steady herself. “Something like that.”
Angel can smell the stench of blood on the girl in his arms and takes in her broken body.
“Can we come in?”
“Of course,” Buffy says, emerging from behind Angel. She puts her arm around Cordelia, allowing the other woman to put all of her weight on her. The rest of the “inner circle” is behind her, Kennedy coming forward to scoop the weak boy up before he collapses. He stiffens in her arms.
“Henry, it’s okay. You’re safe,” Cordelia says softly.
The boy melts, and Kennedy can feel the hot tears on her neck as everything catches up with him.
“To the infirmary, then,” Giles takes control of the situation. “Xander, alert the healers we’re coming.”
Shaken from his Cordy-induced reverie, Xander is on his phone again, his voice near hysterical.
Once they’re in the room that serves as first-aid central in the castle, Angel gingerly lays the unconscious girl out on one of the beds, the healers hurriedly surrounding her.
“How did this happen?” Giles asks as the healers begin their work. His question is directed at Cordelia, who is staring at the girl as the healers start to set her arm. “Put her in a chair,” he orders Buffy gently, noticing the tremor running through Cordelia.
“Cordy,” Buffy tries gently, once she’s settled the other woman in the chair. “What’s going on?”
“She needs blood,” one of the healers, a petite woman with warm brown eyes, interrupts. “Slayer blood.”
Everyone snaps their attention to the healer.
“What’s that, Becky?” Xander says. “Did you say, ‘Slayer blood’?”
“Yes,” Becky nods. “She’s a Slayer. And she needs blood. At this point, mere human blood will not be enough to save her.”
Kennedy, without hesitation, hands Henry off to Xander and rolls up her sleeve. “Mine. Take mine.”
Becky studies her for a moment before nodding. “Your types will match, yes.”
Kennedy nods, pulling a chair over next to Bella and offering her arm.
Giles takes a deep breath. “How about we hold all questions until after everyone’s medical needs are taken care of? Becky, I’d like some of your people to look over both Cordelia and the boy. Henry, is it?”
“Yes,” Cordelia answers, breathily. “Henry. And Bella.”
“Alright then,” Giles says warmly. “While they’re being looked to, the rest of us should leave them in peace.”
Code for he wants to see them all in the situation room.
“Except for you, of course, Kennedy,” Giles adds, nodding to the younger Slayer of the “inner circle”.
Kennedy nods back, head turned away from the needle being shoved in her arm.
The rest of the group begins to file out, Willow first squeezing Kennedy’s shoulder warmly and muttering a soft blessing over the severely injured child. Xander gently drops the boy onto a nearby bed as healers begin to fuss over him. His eye meets Cordelia’s briefly before he too leaves, Dawn in tow. Angel lingers in the door, staring at Cordelia, until Buffy tugs gently on his hand. He follows numbly. Once they’ve all left, Cordelia speaks up.
“Thank you,” she says, finding her strong voice once again. It’s directed at Kennedy, and the younger woman immediately turns her attention to the new arrival. “Thank you so much. You don’t even know us and…”
“Don’t even worry about it,” Kennedy cuts her off, uncomfortable at her praise. “You obviously mean something to them. And… I feel… something, when I see these kids. A connection.”
Cordelia smiles knowingly, thinking of the thousands of realities she knows exist. “Just, thank you. I’m Cordelia, by the way. I went to high school with the Scoobies. At least, my mortal self did.” When a healer moves to examine her, she waves him off. “I’m immortal. I’ll live.”
“Kennedy,” the Slayer introduces herself. “I helped them close the Hellmouth.”
“And fell in love with Willow,” Cordelia observes. Off Kennedy’s questioning glance, she explains, “I’m a Higher Being. I know these things.”
“You worked with Angel. In L.A.”
Cordy tries valiantly to keep the heartbreak from her face, but even Higher Beings aren’t omnipotent. Instead, she stands, legs less shaky, and moves to Henry’s bed. The healers have given him a sleeping potion to help him regain his strength and have started an IV to re-hydrate him. He is otherwise blessedly unharmed. Unlike his Slayer twin sister, he wouldn’t’ve survived the trip from London if he’d been injured. She sits beside him, intertwining their fingers as she looks across to Bella and Kennedy.
Becky is rubbing herbs into Bella’s wounds and whispering spells, trance-like as she works to keep the girl’s heart beating, ignoring the outside bustle. The bones in the broken arm are already knitting back together, the child’s Slayer healing aided by Becky’s powers.
***
“That… that… can’t be her,” Xander insists. “Angel, you said she was dead.”
Angel flinches, watching Xander pace back and forth, Dawn trying to calm him down.
“She is! She was… I… She was dead.”
His last day with her replays in his head, that day where for the first and only time since he sank into the Pacific Ocean, everything was as close to perfect as it got. Fighting the bad guys, Cordy at his side. Cordy, and Fred, and Wesley, and Gunn. All dead now. Lorne nowhere to be found. Connor a grown man, baby on the way, rarely in contact with his father after that fateful final battle. That thing that took Fred’s body wandering in and out of Angel’s unlife, torturing him, reminding him of those brief years where he’d had a family and a life.
“And her body still is,” Willow speaks up.
“So, what? A zombie?” Dawn questions. “She’s looks pretty good for a zombie.”
“A Higher Being,” Willow explains. Angel closes his eyes against the painful memories. “Her mortal life ended the day Angel remembers. But the Powers that Be rewarded her.”
“So she’s dead…” Xander says, still trying to grasp the situation.
“No,” Willow says, firmly. “She’s immortal.”
“And given a new mission,” Buffy realizes in the corner, squeezing Angel’s hand. “Becky said the kid’s a Slayer. If so, she couldn’t’ve been more than a baby when Willow activated all the Slayers. She would need protecting, training.”
“So why wouldn’t the Powers send the girl here?” Giles questions.
“There must be something special about them,” Andrew says. “Extra powers or a prophecy or something.”
Angel shudders. He hates prophecies.
“I hate to ask this, but how do we know it’s actually Cordy? From what Angel’s told us…”
“It’s Cordy,” Angel growls.
“But…” Xander continues.
“I know,” Angel repeats, “It’s Cordy.”
“If Angel says it’s Cordy, it’s Cordy,” Buffy defends, ending the argument. “Will already explained all of that.”
“The kids must be what all those evil groups are after,” Dawn says.
“The two incidents are not necessarily related,” Giles starts.
“I don’t know, Giles,” Willow interrupts thoughtfully. “They seem pretty co-incidental to me.”
“We won’t know anything for certain until we’ve questioned her directly. Until then, I suggest everyone who can, rest up. Andrew, if you would double the watch shift until we’re sure of just what’s going on. And Xander, please ask the psychics to be on extra-high alert.”
Both men nod, and the room clears of everyone except Buffy and Angel, seated in the corner.
“You’re sure it’s her?” she clarifies.
Angel sighs. “You would know if it were him, wouldn’t you?”
Buffy closes her eyes, seeing Spike’s face. Breathlessly, she answers, “Yes.”
He squeezes her hand. “This means she’s been out there. All this time.”
Buffy knows this changes everything. They built their renewed relationship on the fact that both Spike and Cordelia were gone. Being comfortable, mutual second choices coupled with their old love made the world a little less lonely, a little less scary. But now Angel’s first choice is back in the picture, and the lump forming in Buffy’s stomach is not jealousy but longing. Disappointment that Cordy is back while Spike is still ashes.
She lays his head against his shoulder, and they sit in silence.
TBC
It is all happening too fast. One moment fighting off your average vampire thugs, the next huddled in a boxcar barreling through the moors of northern England, bound for a medieval castle in Scotland. A castle she has sworn she would never enter. A castle she tries so hard to forget exists.
But it’s her last resort, her last refuge. Bella lays unconscious in her lap, pulse thready, breathing sporadic. Her hands are sticky with the child’s blood, which has finally slowed in flowing from the twin puncture wounds in her neck, the gash on her forehead, the stab wound in her abdomen. The girl’s right arm falls at an unnatural angle. Henry crouches just inside the open door of the train car, stung by the downpour and staring, unseeing, at the damp, dark land racing by. Those eyes that, in spite of everything he’s seen, are usually so young and bright are now dull and broken.
And suddenly she is so very tired. So tired of running and hiding with two children who have never met a stranger and yet never had a friend. Living from motel to motel, hostel to hostel, all across the globe. New York, Prague, Rome, Istanbul, Shanghai, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo… They all blur together. This isn’t how she had planned to see the world. You know, back when she had been alive.
Anyway, don’t you think the Powers that Be could splurge a little when it came to accommodations? Especially considering how much they wanted these two miracle children alive…
***
“Another spotting of agents from Wolfram & Hart, the Xui Syndicate, the Afolabi crime organization, ‘Abd al-Hamid’s men, and La Familia Rojas. This time in London,” Giles announces to the gathered “inner circle”, an expanded version of what had once been the Scoobies. That name died off so long ago.
Angel hates moments like these, when Giles sounds so much like Wesley that the past ten years melt away. He rubs the headache away from the bridge of his nose, hoping that his memories of the former Watcher will leave with it.
“They’re getting closer,” Buffy speaks up from beside Angel.
“Occult mafias from almost every continent,” Xander observes from the other side of the room, adjusting his eye patch and studying the projected map, which plots the reported sightings across the globe. Removing his hand from Dawn’s knee, he pauses before adding, “They’re tracking something.”
Dammit, when did Xander Harris get so damn observant? And when did I lose the urge to growl at him and Dawn? Angel thinks, returning his attention to the map.
“They’re getting more frequent. Whatever they’re tracking is on the move,” Angel says, surprised at how rough his voice has become.
“We’ve been getting these reports for a decade now,” Kennedy offers, “But never all five in the same place, all in a row.”
“Until three months ago,” Willow pipes up from beside her.
“So they’re getting closer to their goal,” Andrew says, standing and moving to the map. “They all met up in St. Petersburg in February. That’s our first reported sighting of all five groups. Their quarry must be pretty desperate to go to Russia in the winter. Like Napoleon and Hitler.”
Giles has the grace roll his eyes at Andrew’s last comment. No matter how much Andrew changes, his moments of nerd-dom still abound.
“So the question remains, what exactly are they hunting?” Giles asks, surveying the room. They are no longer the children he met on the Hellmouth. Even young Dawn is growing close to thirty. Their eyes are all haunted, their moments of joy few and far between. So much responsibility on all of these shoulders.
Xander gives a yelp before sheepishly realizing it’s his cell phone vibrating against his thigh. He answers it shortly, his eyes widening as he listens.
“What do the psychics say?” he demands. “A Higher Being?! Give us a visual.”
The screen changes to one of the cameras on the outside walls of the castle, the one angled at the front door.
“Maybe that’s what they’re hunting,” Dawn suggests as the camera zooms in and focuses. Three figures come into view, a small boy and a woman carrying a severely injured little girl in her arms. All three figures are haggard, but as the zoom closes in on the face of the woman, a collective gasp echoes through the room.
“Oh my God,” Buffy manages.
Angel bursts out of the room, Buffy quick at his heels. “Angel, wait…”
“What?” Kennedy asks, staring at the woman on the screen. She turns to Willow. “Who is that?”
The witch’s eyes are haunted as she answers.
“Cordelia.”
***
Angel tears through the hallways of the castle, ignoring curious Slayers, witches, and Watchers, bowling them over. His mind is singularly focused on meeting whatever is out there and strangling it slowly and brutally for daring to wear his Cordelia’s face. That’s already happened once, and his heart can’t break into any more pieces, even if it doesn’t beat.
“Angel, wait…” Buffy repeats, close at his heels. “We don’t know who or what is out there. If they’re on our side or not…”
Angel turns on her, eyes yellow in rage. “I don’t give a damn who’s side it’s on, Buffy. Nothing has a right to that face…”
Buffy’s eyes are sympathetic, her words soft as she tries to calm him. “I know, Angel, I know. I’m just asking you to think a little before…”
“What if it were Spike’s face?” Angel bites out.
Buffy’s face clouds, and she takes a step back.
Angel turns again, headed for the door. Buffy takes a few moments to recover before following Angel.
The ensouled vampire pushes past the Slayers on guard at the door and swings it open. Looking into those eyes is like being slammed with a sledgehammer. He freezes, the anger draining from him. It’s her. He can feel it. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. He will never forget those eyes.
“Angel…” she whimpers, soaked and exhausted and worried sick. Her knees are shaking, ready to collapse from the emotion. “Help… please…”
When he goes to catch her, he instead finds the small body in her arms pushed into his, her eyes pleading.
“You’re dead,” he manages, dorkily.
“Yeah,” Cordelia admits with a weak smile, leaning on the boy at her side to steady herself. “Something like that.”
Angel can smell the stench of blood on the girl in his arms and takes in her broken body.
“Can we come in?”
“Of course,” Buffy says, emerging from behind Angel. She puts her arm around Cordelia, allowing the other woman to put all of her weight on her. The rest of the “inner circle” is behind her, Kennedy coming forward to scoop the weak boy up before he collapses. He stiffens in her arms.
“Henry, it’s okay. You’re safe,” Cordelia says softly.
The boy melts, and Kennedy can feel the hot tears on her neck as everything catches up with him.
“To the infirmary, then,” Giles takes control of the situation. “Xander, alert the healers we’re coming.”
Shaken from his Cordy-induced reverie, Xander is on his phone again, his voice near hysterical.
Once they’re in the room that serves as first-aid central in the castle, Angel gingerly lays the unconscious girl out on one of the beds, the healers hurriedly surrounding her.
“How did this happen?” Giles asks as the healers begin their work. His question is directed at Cordelia, who is staring at the girl as the healers start to set her arm. “Put her in a chair,” he orders Buffy gently, noticing the tremor running through Cordelia.
“Cordy,” Buffy tries gently, once she’s settled the other woman in the chair. “What’s going on?”
“She needs blood,” one of the healers, a petite woman with warm brown eyes, interrupts. “Slayer blood.”
Everyone snaps their attention to the healer.
“What’s that, Becky?” Xander says. “Did you say, ‘Slayer blood’?”
“Yes,” Becky nods. “She’s a Slayer. And she needs blood. At this point, mere human blood will not be enough to save her.”
Kennedy, without hesitation, hands Henry off to Xander and rolls up her sleeve. “Mine. Take mine.”
Becky studies her for a moment before nodding. “Your types will match, yes.”
Kennedy nods, pulling a chair over next to Bella and offering her arm.
Giles takes a deep breath. “How about we hold all questions until after everyone’s medical needs are taken care of? Becky, I’d like some of your people to look over both Cordelia and the boy. Henry, is it?”
“Yes,” Cordelia answers, breathily. “Henry. And Bella.”
“Alright then,” Giles says warmly. “While they’re being looked to, the rest of us should leave them in peace.”
Code for he wants to see them all in the situation room.
“Except for you, of course, Kennedy,” Giles adds, nodding to the younger Slayer of the “inner circle”.
Kennedy nods back, head turned away from the needle being shoved in her arm.
The rest of the group begins to file out, Willow first squeezing Kennedy’s shoulder warmly and muttering a soft blessing over the severely injured child. Xander gently drops the boy onto a nearby bed as healers begin to fuss over him. His eye meets Cordelia’s briefly before he too leaves, Dawn in tow. Angel lingers in the door, staring at Cordelia, until Buffy tugs gently on his hand. He follows numbly. Once they’ve all left, Cordelia speaks up.
“Thank you,” she says, finding her strong voice once again. It’s directed at Kennedy, and the younger woman immediately turns her attention to the new arrival. “Thank you so much. You don’t even know us and…”
“Don’t even worry about it,” Kennedy cuts her off, uncomfortable at her praise. “You obviously mean something to them. And… I feel… something, when I see these kids. A connection.”
Cordelia smiles knowingly, thinking of the thousands of realities she knows exist. “Just, thank you. I’m Cordelia, by the way. I went to high school with the Scoobies. At least, my mortal self did.” When a healer moves to examine her, she waves him off. “I’m immortal. I’ll live.”
“Kennedy,” the Slayer introduces herself. “I helped them close the Hellmouth.”
“And fell in love with Willow,” Cordelia observes. Off Kennedy’s questioning glance, she explains, “I’m a Higher Being. I know these things.”
“You worked with Angel. In L.A.”
Cordy tries valiantly to keep the heartbreak from her face, but even Higher Beings aren’t omnipotent. Instead, she stands, legs less shaky, and moves to Henry’s bed. The healers have given him a sleeping potion to help him regain his strength and have started an IV to re-hydrate him. He is otherwise blessedly unharmed. Unlike his Slayer twin sister, he wouldn’t’ve survived the trip from London if he’d been injured. She sits beside him, intertwining their fingers as she looks across to Bella and Kennedy.
Becky is rubbing herbs into Bella’s wounds and whispering spells, trance-like as she works to keep the girl’s heart beating, ignoring the outside bustle. The bones in the broken arm are already knitting back together, the child’s Slayer healing aided by Becky’s powers.
***
“That… that… can’t be her,” Xander insists. “Angel, you said she was dead.”
Angel flinches, watching Xander pace back and forth, Dawn trying to calm him down.
“She is! She was… I… She was dead.”
His last day with her replays in his head, that day where for the first and only time since he sank into the Pacific Ocean, everything was as close to perfect as it got. Fighting the bad guys, Cordy at his side. Cordy, and Fred, and Wesley, and Gunn. All dead now. Lorne nowhere to be found. Connor a grown man, baby on the way, rarely in contact with his father after that fateful final battle. That thing that took Fred’s body wandering in and out of Angel’s unlife, torturing him, reminding him of those brief years where he’d had a family and a life.
“And her body still is,” Willow speaks up.
“So, what? A zombie?” Dawn questions. “She’s looks pretty good for a zombie.”
“A Higher Being,” Willow explains. Angel closes his eyes against the painful memories. “Her mortal life ended the day Angel remembers. But the Powers that Be rewarded her.”
“So she’s dead…” Xander says, still trying to grasp the situation.
“No,” Willow says, firmly. “She’s immortal.”
“And given a new mission,” Buffy realizes in the corner, squeezing Angel’s hand. “Becky said the kid’s a Slayer. If so, she couldn’t’ve been more than a baby when Willow activated all the Slayers. She would need protecting, training.”
“So why wouldn’t the Powers send the girl here?” Giles questions.
“There must be something special about them,” Andrew says. “Extra powers or a prophecy or something.”
Angel shudders. He hates prophecies.
“I hate to ask this, but how do we know it’s actually Cordy? From what Angel’s told us…”
“It’s Cordy,” Angel growls.
“But…” Xander continues.
“I know,” Angel repeats, “It’s Cordy.”
“If Angel says it’s Cordy, it’s Cordy,” Buffy defends, ending the argument. “Will already explained all of that.”
“The kids must be what all those evil groups are after,” Dawn says.
“The two incidents are not necessarily related,” Giles starts.
“I don’t know, Giles,” Willow interrupts thoughtfully. “They seem pretty co-incidental to me.”
“We won’t know anything for certain until we’ve questioned her directly. Until then, I suggest everyone who can, rest up. Andrew, if you would double the watch shift until we’re sure of just what’s going on. And Xander, please ask the psychics to be on extra-high alert.”
Both men nod, and the room clears of everyone except Buffy and Angel, seated in the corner.
“You’re sure it’s her?” she clarifies.
Angel sighs. “You would know if it were him, wouldn’t you?”
Buffy closes her eyes, seeing Spike’s face. Breathlessly, she answers, “Yes.”
He squeezes her hand. “This means she’s been out there. All this time.”
Buffy knows this changes everything. They built their renewed relationship on the fact that both Spike and Cordelia were gone. Being comfortable, mutual second choices coupled with their old love made the world a little less lonely, a little less scary. But now Angel’s first choice is back in the picture, and the lump forming in Buffy’s stomach is not jealousy but longing. Disappointment that Cordy is back while Spike is still ashes.
She lays his head against his shoulder, and they sit in silence.
TBC