BIRTHDAY FIC for myhappyface: Man of Many Hearts (B/A, D/A, G/W, NC-17)
Dear Holly, yes I know your birthday is tomorrow, but I will be at work for a thousand hours and wanted you to have the chance to read this as soon as you wanted. I hope it's the happiest birthday ever. <3
TITLE: Man of Many Hearts
RATING: NC-17
FANDOMS: BtVS/AtS (AU. In a big way.)
PAIRING: Buffy/Angel, Darla/Angel, Gunn/Wesley
SUMMARY: Hard ass homicide detective Angel Chase has just been assigned a new partner. But brand-new detective Buffy Summers is going to do more for Angel than watch his back . . .
DISCLAIMER: Joss & friends created Buffy; myhappyface created the copverse ( read her outline here and her first chapter here); I just filled in some blanks.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Millions upon millions of thanks to kita0610, my personal role model, for the beta. But mostly: super, super, happy birthday to Holly, the vampire with a soul to my snarky, Milano-shod Vision Girl. Baby, I love you like Rahm Emanual loves being a pimp.
Prologue: In Which Things Are Lost, and Begin
They pull to the curb of her favorite restaurant at half past eight; he moves quickly from the driver's seat to open her door and sweep his arm gallantly in front of her.
"My lady," he says, and smiles. She hits him on the chest affectionately, and they go inside. Two hours later, at that same curb, the knife slides into Darla's stomach as easily as if it were moving through air. Angel recognizes the dealer he had put away earlier too late to stop him, and his suddenly clumsy hands fumble with the leather snap that holsters his gun because Darla is stumbling, and Darla is falling -
He pools his jacket under her head and dials 911, but she's losing too much blood far too quickly, and the hand he presses over the wound is soaked within seconds. She lifts her own hand to his cheek, smears his face. "My goodbye kiss," she says softly, and he bends down to her lips. Catches her last breath in his own and holds it for as long as he can.
Their son dies with her on that dirty street, although Angel will not know this until seven hours and thirty-two minutes later. He will break four of the small bones in his left hand when he punches the wall, hard enough to crack the plaster.
He buries her on a Sunday.
The service is well-attended: Cordelia and Doyle stand at his left and Gunn flanks his right, Wes beside him. The men and women Angel work with are all there in uniform, as are the waitstaff from Darla's tea house. He is grateful for the support, but -
Hold off the earth, he thinks desperately, hold off the earth awhile till I have caught her once more in mine arms.
And then the priest's voice falls silent, and Angel steps forward to bury his lover with a handful of dust.
Chapter One: In Which Fashion Sense is a Total Asset, and Angel is too Pretty
What Buffy likes best about her promotion is no more polyester. Of course, now that she can wear what she chooses, she has to choose what to wear.
“Oh!” she groans. “How can I be late already? It’s my first day!”
“Well,” Dawn says, entering Buffy’s bedroom in her pajamas, a mug of coffee steaming her fresh, freckled face. “There’s fashion sense, and there’s punctuality, and you always choose the wrong one.”
Buffy glares at her sister. “Hush. My keen fashion sense is a total asset.”
“Sure it is. To everything but getting you to work on time.”
***
Gunn’s office is empty, but Angel lacks the energy to chase after a quarry that will eventually come home to roost. Maybe as a young buck, eager in a pressed uniform and shined shoes, but now he has seen too much, lost too much.
Happily, the trials of life that temper zeal breed patience, and Angel does not quantify the time spent waiting, merely rests his unpolished shoes on Gunn’s desk and marinates in the silent comfort of a familiar place, familiar company.
“You could turn the lights on,” Gunn says, doing just that as he enters his office. “Vampire.”
“Nitpicker.”
Angel draws back his legs to allow Gunn room to pass, and then immediately places his feet back on the desk.
“Yeah,” Gunn says, dropping a handful of reports on his desk, “I’m the anal one. Do you still sort your ammunition alphabetically?”
Angel squirms. “A little order never hurt anything. It’s right there, you know, the saying-law and order?”
Gunn sighs. “What did you want?”
“To keep my arsenal organized-”
Gunn nails him with the same withering look that often convinces the ADA that “plea bargain” is a profanity. “No, here, right now. In my office.”
“Oh.” Angel straightens in his chair, letting his feet drop from Gunn’s desk to the floor. “That. I was hoping you, with all your political savvy-” Gunn frowns. “-no, I really mean it-” Gunn smiles. “-might have a little above-my-pay-grade information for me.”
Gunn sinks into the chair behind his desk. “About what?”
“About my new partner.”
“I thought you weren’t caring about that.”
Angel shrugs. “I’m not caring. I’m researching.”
Gunn rolls his eyes, but he also rolls his desk chair over to the filing cabinet. He selects a file and wheels back t ohis desk, thumbing through it.
“This is off the record,” Gunn says.
“My middle name,” Angel says silkily, scooting his own chair closer to Gunn’s desk to aid his not-so-subtle peering at the file. “Anyway, it’s nothing I won’t know tomorrow.”
“I’ve seen your file, too; I know your middle name’s Liam. But you’re right.” He flips through the file. “Summers, Buffy A.”
Angel frowns. “Buffy?”
Gunn raises an eyebrow, peering at his friend from over the file. “Angel?”
Angel frowns. “Fine. But I don’t know her.”
“She’s a transfer from LA-”
“I don’t know anyone named Buffy in LA’s homicide, either.”
“She’s not transferring from homicide-”
Angel scoots his chair closer. “Vice? Grab?”
Gunn angles the file toward himself and away from Angel’s prying eyes. “She’s coming off patrol.”
Angel groans and deflates into his chair. “A rookie?”
“No,” Gunn says, “she’s done her time as a portable, and she just passed her detective’s test-”
Angel rises from his chair and looms over Gunn’s desk, snatching the file from his hands before he can even fuss. Angel’s eyes fly over the dry, official text and the dry, official personnel photo to his new partner’s birthday.
“She’s twenty-three?” he asks, looking up at Gunn in horror. “She’s an infant.”
“She is not,” Gunn says, diving to wrest the file from Angel, who deftly evades him. “She’s a detective. And her commander at Hollywood has nothing but good things to say about her-”
Angel snorts. “Then why are they exiling her to the Hellmouth?”
Gunn’s face suddenly assumed the same expression he wore when he locked the keys in his cruiser during an academy precision driving exercise. It is enough to tear Angel’s attention away from his infant new partner’s file.
“What?”
Gunn shifts uncomfortably. “She kind of . . . blew up a meth lab.”
Angel is so stunned that Gunn is able to take Buffy’s file from him with no fight whatsoever.
“What?” Angel says finally.
“Look,” Gunn says, “She’s exuberant. Eager. She’s just undisciplined. She lacks finesse. They’re pairing her with an experienced, competent older officer to temper her-like when you came up from patrol and they put you with Whistler.”
Angel sighs. “So I get to be the cranky, no fun old fogey?”
Gunn smiles. “Why change?”
***
One of the definite high points of being a cop is the lack of serious paperwork. Not like there’s none, but it’s light compared to working in medicine or the post office or something.
It definitely cuts down on the amount of desk clutter.
And so Buffy takes one cardboard box full of pencils and pens and pictures of her mom and sister to her first day of work. She and her new partner share an office, but it’s empty. Buffy frowns, and sets her box on the empty desk, the one not covered with books and pictures of two beautiful women, one blonde, one brunette.
Stood up on her first day. How about that.
Buffy slumps down into her office chair. Swivels a little. She stares at her watch face for a moment, then begins halfheartedly emptying her box off onto her desk.
The door swings open, and a black man in a smart suit sticks his head in. Buffy perks.
“Sergeant Chase?”
The black man comes in, one hand fanned across his chest. Moi?
“Me?” he says. “’Fraid not. I’m Charles Gunn, your liaison to Internal Affairs. Sergeant Chase wanted to be here to meet you himself, but half of Vice is out with some nasty stomach thing, and they called him in to pinch hit. I volunteered to come show you around while he’s out arresting johns.”
“Oh. Okay.” Buffy stands awkwardly. “So . . . is there paperwork?”
***
Gunn helps her with her paperwork, and then shows her around the station a little. She’s more than a little surprised.
“Your homicide department is huge,” she says. “I think it’s bigger than ours-er, the one in LA.”
“When they transferred you down here, you hear Sunnydale’s nickname?” Gunn asks.
“. . . the Hellmouth?”
“Now you know why it’s called that. It’s a pretty white bread population: mostly middle class, mostly white. But for some reason our violence per capita’s off the charts. They’ve done all kindsa studies tryin’ to figure out why, but they all pretty much come out the same: that’s just the way it is.”
***
The morning is sunny but cool, and Buffy is glad she wore her jacket, though she’s beginning to think the miniskirt wasn’t such a good idea. But it was so cute in the mirror this morning. . . . Gunn buys them coffee at a local bistro, but they get it to go. Paper cups in hand, they walk through the sunbathed streets. Along the way, Gunn points out interesting landmarks: the library, the post office, the alleyway where he investigated the Sunnydale Strangler’s first victim.
Buffy sips her coffee, and in the reflective surfaces of car and shop windows, she watches the man following them. Six foot or so, two hundred pounds, dark complexion. White wife beater, black leather pants and boots, and shoulder holsters. Two shining Glock nine mils. Gorgeous, in a probably convicted of a few felonies kind of way.
The guy, not the guns.
When he’s within a yard, Buffy throws her mocha-half full-into a garbage can. Their shadow is two feet away. It is too early for this crap, and it is her first day. A foot away. Buffy spins, one hand flying to the man’s throat, the other to his shoulder, her whole weight and force pushing him against the nearest available wall-a trendy boutique window display.
The man’s dark eyes are wide with surprise. When Buffy removes her hand from his throat, he coughs and then rasps, “Is there a problem, ma’am?”
“Let’s start with why you’re following me, and segue directly into you showing me the permit for those firearms.”
But then Gunn starts laughing.
“So I guess you weren’t posing as a john?” he asks.
The man frowns. “Apparently, I’m too pretty to be a john.”
Gunn doubles over laughing, his large hands grabbing at his stomach.
“Detective Summers,” he gasps, “Detective Sergeant Angel Chase. In his hookerwear.”
Buffy blinks, finally getting the joke.
“Oh,” she says. She lets Detective Sergeant Angel Chase, not only her new partner but also, technically, a superior officer, go. “Um, sorry about that.”
“It’s his fault,” Gunn says. “He skulks.”
Angel clears his throat awkwardly. “So, um, hi. Detective Summers. Sorry I couldn’t be there to meet you this morning, but uh-”
“You were being a hooker?” she asks.
“Fake hooker,” Angel insists. “Like you’ve never gotten a bad undercover gig.”
Buffy deflates. “I have to be a Catholic schoolgirl a lot.”
Angel perks up. “Really?”
Gunn clears his throat. Loudly. “Detectives. I believe Fred is expecting you.”
Buffy frowns. “Who’s Fred?”
“The coroner,” Angel says. “Shall we?”
Buffy tries, very unsuccessfully, to pull her eyes from her new partner’s outfit. And the big, rippling muscles beneath the outfit. “Uh, yes, sir.”
Angel frowns. “Don’t call me that.”
“Um . . . Detective Sergeant?”
“Angel.”
“Angel. Oh. Oh, okay. Angel.”
***
The morgue is quiet, a brushed metal cathedral with few parishioners. The sole occupant-the sole living occupant, anyway-is a whisper thin brunette in a lab coat, sitting at a computer and eating a taco.
Angel’s footsteps are silent on the concrete floor; he blends naturally into the quiet kingdom. Blending in has never been Buffy’s strong suit. Trying to be stealth, she trips over a stainless steel instruments table, and raises a great clatter throughout the morgue.
The brunette in the lab coat looks up.
“Oh!” she says with a soft drawl, her hands fluttering over her face, arranging her glasses. “Angel! Hi! I-I didn’t see you there!”
She jumps up from the computer desk and hurries toward them.
Angel smiles.
“Fred,” he says, “this is my new partner, Buffy Summers. Buffy, our ME, Winifred Burkle.”
“How do you do,” Fred says.
Buffy smiles. “Hi.”
“So!” Fred says, scurrying back to her desk. She slides a pair of latex gloves from a box, and slips them on. “I guess y’all are coming after that Vampire kill?”
Buffy startles. “Vampires?”
“It’s a gang,” Angel says.
Fred hurries over to the bank of brushed metal doors. She pulls one open, and slides out the drawer with its tissue paper body bag.
“I know it’s a gang,” Buffy says. “We had big trouble with them in LA-I just didn’t know you had them here.”
“Betcha didn’t know you were partnered with one,” Fred says, unzipping the body bag.
Buffy starts. “What?”
“Former Vampire,” Angel smiles. “I’m reformed.”
“So he’s kinda like a good Vampire,” Fred says. “Like a Carebear with fangs.”
Buffy looks distrustfully at her partner. “You used to be a Vampire?”
Angel shrugs. “I was young and stupid. You never made any mistakes as a kid?”
Buffy’s mouth twists; her eyes fall to the floor. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Just as Buffy is kicking herself, not enough to assault him, now she has to tell him literally that she doesn’t trust him, she feels a gentle pressure on her upper arm. She looks up; Angel’s hand, a gentle squeeze. She meets his eyes, and he smiles.
She smiles back.
“Okay!” Fred says, pulling the body bag away from the corpse on the drawer. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
And suddenly Buffy is very aware that they are looking at a body, a dead body, all pale and bloodless and not alive, just inches away from them.
Angel squeezes her arm again. “It’s okay. It takes some getting used to.”
Buffy tries to tear her eyes away from the body, but cannot. A woman, maybe her age, so still-forever still. Her skin is so pale it looks like paper. She doesn’t look real.
Those fresher dead look a lot more real.
“It’s not my first dead body,” she says.
She could feel the gunshot more than she could hear it; time slowed so. Merrick crumpled, like a kite when the wind died, a poppy red blossom unfolding over his chest. And gravity must have increased, because Buffy tried to reach out, to stop Merrick from falling, but her hands, her own hands, were suddenly too heavy to lift.
“Harmony Kendall, twenty-four,” Fred says. “Cause of death looks like asphyxiation.”
Angel motions to dark splotches marring the girl’s cheek and chest. “It looks like someone knocked her around a little first.”
“No. Those bruises, all the bruising I’ve found, actually, are way pre-mortem. They’re already starting to heal, see how they’re darker on the edges than in the middle?”
“So she was suffocated?” Buffy asks.
Fred twists her mouth into an indecisive bow. “Maybe.”
Angel crosses his arms over his chest. “Maybe? What’s cause of death?”
“It’s asphyxiation,” Fred says. “But until I get tox results back, I’m not sure it wasn’t drug-related.”
“So it might not be a murder?” Angel asks.
Fred shakes her head. “Maybe just an OD.”
Buffy frowns. “So why are we here?”
“You said it was a Vampire kill,” Angel says. “Why?”
“Gimme a hand?”
Angel slips on some gloves, cartoonishly small on his large hands. He lets Fred direct him through lifting up the body, turning it onto its stomach.
“That’s why,” Fred says, pointing to a small tattoo on the small of the girl’s back.
Buffy squints. “Is that a carrot?”
“No,” Angel says. His face is grim. “It’s a spike.”
***
Gunn thumbs through Harmony’s jacket. “Harmony Kendall, twenty-four. Local goodtime girl. Your friends at Vice’ve picked her up on possession charges a few times, but she’s never done any real time. Spotty employment history, mostly few-month gigs at local boutiques. Latest claim to fame: latchkey girlfriend of your favorite Vampire big bad, William Pratt.”
Buffy frowns. “Who’s William Pratt?”
Angel answers, but his eyes are on his desk. “Bad guy. Lower management in our local chapter of the Vamps, but working his way up the food chain.”
“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
Angel raises his eyes to her. His gaze is so hard, so focused, that Buffy is nearly frightened. That’s not a look she usually gets from good guys.
“Absolutely,” he says.
Chapter Two: In Which Gunn is a Double Agent, and Angel Gets Drunk
Angel is a breakfast master chef. It’s a shame, really, that he never expanded his culinary horizons to any of the day’s other meals, but it’s so difficult to get excited about cooking dinner when your shift ends at two AM.
“She’s prettier than your last partner,” Gunn says, drizzling hollandaise over every scrap of food on his plate.
“Yeah,” Angel says. He draws whorls in his syrup with the tines of his fork. “I noticed.”
Gunn raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I mean-Doyle was kind of scrawny. That long bird neck.” That Angel had imagined wrapping his hands around when Doyle told him he was following Cordelia to Los Angeles. Doyle is a good man, and he seems to legitimately want good things for Cordy, but you just can’t let it go when a man tells you he wants to bone your sister. You just can’t.
Gunn hits him with a long look. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, man. I’m sure on your scale of hotness, Buffy Summers just barely ranks above that perpetually drunk Irishman who’s bird-dogging your sister.”
Angel frowns. “Leave Cordelia out of this. I’m okay hitting you.”
“I mean, that ass, in that skirt?”
Angel starts to rise from his chair. “I’m not kidding, Gunn-”
Gunn rolls his eyes. “Talking about your new hottie ridealong, dude. Not your womb roomie.”
Angel relaxes back into his seat. His eyes focus dreamily on empty space. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s-I like the skirts. I hope that’s a trend that continues.”
***
When it became apparent that Angel was not Joe Here’s What I’m Feeling, Buffy resorted to gossip. This was how she discovered that her new partner was widower of the blonde on his desk, and brother to the brunette, whom Buffy thought she’d seen in a rom-com last summer, during which her date had dumped popcorn all over her lap during some clumsy mid-movie making out.
That wasn’t in the movie; that had really happened.
It was her own idea to come in early and do some slightly illegal snooping on the SPD computers.
“You are so dead.”
Buffy startles. “Gunn! You scared me! I-you can’t tell him.”
Gunn frowns. “He’s my friend.”
“And he’s my partner! And it’s important for me to know stuff about him. You know, so I don’t do something stupid that’ll make him hate me. And so I can have his back.”
Gunn relents, and pulls a chair up beside her. “Okay. But this is super top secret.”
“You were never here.”
Buffy scrolls past the official rigmarole, names and dates, case unsolved. Halfway down the page, a photograph of the victim. They’re usually DMV photos, stunned deer eyes and bad hair, but Buffy can tell that this is a photograph that someone took from their home, from their wallet.
“She was beautiful,” Buffy says. She was. It was a black and white photograph, but Buffy could see the spark of life and wit in the woman’s eyes.
“She was,” Gunn says. “And smart, quick-she kept Angel on his toes.” He lowers his eyes. “The man’s a rock, Summers. But losin’ his girl hit him where he lives.”
Buffy scrolls down. Autopsy results showed Darla was pregnant. A boy. Buffy swallows dryly.
“It was never solved?” she asks.
“Oh it’s solved,” Gunn says. “Just not prosecuted.”
He types a few commands into the terminal, and Darla’s report bleeds away. It is replaced by a pair of mug shots: a thin blonde man with pronounced cheekbones and a cocky smirk.
“Pratt, William,” she reads. “Hey! That’s the guy Angel likes for the Kendall murder.”
“Yeah. Keep reading.”
“Pratt, William. Also known as William the Bloody; also known as Spike. Oh! The tattoo thing makes sense now . . .”
“He’s a freelance creep,” Gunn says. “Mostly he’s trying to make a dishonest dollar-we’ve gotten him for robbery, runnin’ drugs, girls, whatever-but it’s generally accepted by everyone but the DA that he’s also good for several murders. Some really nasty shit-vics tortured and killed with a railroad spike. Hence the nicknames.”
Buffy grimaces. “Charming.”
“Angel’s spent years trying to bring him down for the murders, but every time he gets close, something happens. There’s not enough evidence, or Spike’s got a dubious alibi, or a few key witnesses suddenly go missing.”
“Or the detective’s wife gets killed,” Buffy says.
“Yeah. That’s the one that gets me. Angel saw him. He saw him do it, but Pratt cooks up some alibi and the prosecutor says Angel’s not in his right mind; he’s so distressed over his wife’s death that he’s making up killers. Pratt starts whining that Angel’s persecuting him; DA hears ‘lawsuit against the city’ and runs for the hills.”
“Do you believe it? That Angel was so grief stricken that he just thought he recognized the killer?”
“Not for a minute. Losing Darla broke Angel’s heart; there’s never been anything wrong with his head.”
***
Angel finds Pratt living in a halfway house in the seedier part of town, a condition of his recent parole. He and Buffy interrogate the staff, who are oblivious, but find Pratt missing. Angel wants to stakeout, but Buffy suggests visiting his PO before doing any lying in wait. The ride back is tense.
“You’re not what I expected,” Angel says abruptly.
Buffy looks up from studying her manicure. “Huh?”
“When they told me I was getting a new partner. You’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect? Xena in a bulletproof Wonderbra?”
Angel holds up one hand in surrender as best he can while driving.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says. “You just don’t really . . . there’s a type of person, I guess, who does this job.”
“And I’m not it?”
“No. You’re something different.”
Buffy relents. “You’re right. I kind of fell into it. Or . . . I was chosen, I guess.”
Angel grinned. “Career fair?”
“No. When I was fifteen, I accidentally shoplifted a lipstick from Neiman’s.” She catches Angel’s expression, and elaborates. “Really an accident. I just slipped it into my purse so my hands were free to try on this dress . . . and I just forgot about it. And this cop, Merrick, was moonlighting as a security guard, and he caught me.”
“You got arrested? Over an accidental lipstick?”
“No. He didn’t arrest me. But he said he would . . . or I could join the trainee program. It was my choice.”
“And you chose ridealongs over juvenile court.”
Buffy raises a brow. “Wouldn’t you?”
Angel laughs. “Now-yes. At fifteen? No way.”
“You were a punk.”
“Oh yeah. A bad influence, for sure.”
“Well, I wasn’t a thief, but I probably wasn’t a good influence, either. I was . . . well, kind of shallow. My whole life was boys, shoes, and pompons. The ridealongs, spending time with Merrick, it really helped me gain perspective, not just about the world, but about myself. What I was capable of.”
“I’d like to see that,” Angel says. “I bet it’s a show.”
“What?”
He smiles. “What you’re capable of.”
***
“Officer Morgan?”
The pretty brunette officer smiles silkily as she rises from her seat to meet them.
“It’s Lilah, actually,” she purrs, her gaze traveling up and down Angel’s broad form.
Buffy hates her instantly.
“Angel Chase, homicide; this is my partner, Buffy Summers. One of your parolees is a person of interest in one of our cases. William Pratt.”
Lilah raises an eyebrow. “Yes, I’m sure he’s a person of interest to you, Detective.”
Angel frowns. “Excuse me?”
“I’m very good at my job, Detective Chase. I know my parolees, and I know that you and my parolee have a history. I know that you’ve falsely accused him of several crimes-”
Angel takes a step toward the PO, jaw taut, gaze hard.
“Officer Morgan, I might remind you that your duty is to the justice system.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Is this a there’s no I in team speech? My duty, Detective, is to the interests of the people I represent. And sometimes my job is to protect my parolees from police officers.”
Buffy frowns. “So, wait. You think your job is to protect criminals from justice?”
“From abusers of the justice system, yes,” Lilah says.
Angel glowers. “I’m not interested in an ideological discussion. I’m interested in whether you have an alibi for Mr. Pratt, and as your commanding officer, I expect a swift and respectful answer.”
Lilah purses her lips. “Certainly, sir.” She steps back behind her desk, flips pages in her date book. “Do you have a date in mind?”
“The tenth and eleventh, eight PM to four AM.”
“It appears Mr. Pratt went to a movie, and then out for drinks.”
“With his girlfriend?” Buffy asks.
“I don’t know,” Lilah says. “I’m not paid to keep track of her.”
Angel narrows his eyes.
“Maybe I meant the eighth and ninth,” he says slowly.
“Recovering from a root canal,” Lilah says, without glancing down at her date book.
“And any other day we ask for?” Buffy says.
“I’ll have an answer for that, too,” Lilah says.
Angel takes a step toward the desk, jaw and fists clenched. Buffy takes his arm, arrests his motion.
“Come on,” she says softly.
“This isn’t over,” Angel says.
“It really is,” Lilah says. “Have a nice day.”
***
At the end of the day, Gunn finds Buffy alone at her desk.
“Where’s your partner?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Off moping somewhere. This whole Spike thing really has his panties in a twist.”
“Man did kill his wife.” Buffy cannot find a response. But Gunn smiles at her, bumps his shoulder into hers. “Come out with us tonight.”
She is surprised by the invitation. “Huh?”
“This Pratt business is no good for Angel. He’s approaching Maximum Brooding Capacity. We need to take him out, force some fun into him. You should come.”
“Okay. Do I have time to go home and change?”
Gunn glances briefly at Buffy’s outfit.
“No need,” he says. “I think what you’re wearing will be good for Angel’s morale.”
***
Gunn and Angel started the evening much better than Buffy and Wesley, Gunn’s partner, at pool. However, they also started the evening out-drinking Buffy and Wesley two drinks to one, so after a couple hours the odds are more or less even.
“Nine in the side,” Angel says. Then, cue sliding in his liquor-languid hands, he sinks the twelve ball into the side pocket.
“I think you need to check your math, partner,” Buffy says, and cues up her turn.
“Hey,” Angel protests. “It’s still my turn. I put it in there. Didn’t scratch.”
“That wasn’t the nine ball.”
Angel frowns. “Really?” He squints at the table. “Where is the nine ball . . . ?”
Walking around the table for her next shot, Buffy appropriates Angel’s glass, sitting on the edge of the pool table with an inch of Irish whiskey still in it.
“I think you’re over your limit,” Buffy says.
Angel grabs a chair from their abandoned dinner table, and sinks into it, pool cue laid across his legs.
“You’re not wrong,” he says.
“Ne quid nimis,” Wesley says, divesting Angel of his pool cue, and his turn.
“Huh?” Buffy says. “What is that, Spanish? I thought you were from England.”
“It’s Latin,” Wesley says.
“English teaches Latin at Sunnydale U,” Gunn says. He turns his attention to his partner. “You know I don’t speak your dead language.”
“Nothing too much,” Angel translates. His eyes have drifted closed.
Buffy raises an eyebrow. “You speak Latin?”
Angel peeks at her. “I was an altar boy.”
Buffy rolls her eyes. “Of course you were.”
Angel moans. “I think I need a ride home.”
“You’ll live until we finish the game,” Gunn says. He narrows his eyes as he cues up his ball. “You’re going down, lightweights. Wes, I win, the dishes are all yours for a week.”
“Ah,” Wesley says, rolling his eyes. “A change from the usual.”
Buffy reracks her cue. “You two cutthroats finish without me. I’ll take drunky home.”
***
Angel lolls in the passenger’s seat. Buffy squints at the directions Wesley wrote for her on a cocktail napkin, his neat copperplate writing barely illuminated by the dim dash lights.
“Maybe you could just tell me where to go,” Buffy says. “I turn left here, right?”
“Is it inappropriate for me to tell you how amazing your legs look in those skirts you wear?” Angel murmurs.
Buffy is glad the light is so inadequate; this way, Angel cannot see her blushing.
“Hush,” she says.
“Really,” he continues, “it’s a little ridiculous how attracted I am to you. I mean, you’re my partner and we’re supposed to be solving crimes, and protecting and serving, helping people . . . but when we’re together, all I can think about is how badly I want to kiss you.”
Buffy swallows thickly. “Kiss me?”
“This is it,” Angel says.
Buffy’s heart is a galley drum in those old movies about slave ships. Thrum, thrum, thrum, vibrating her hull, directing her internal machinations.
“It?” she asks, trembling.
Angel points. “My apartment.”
Buffy’s face burns. “Right.”
She parks, kills the engine. She puts the keys in her pocket and goes around to help Angel out. He just waits for her to retrieve him, watching her passively. He takes her proffered hand, but when he stands up straight the blood rushes to his head; the world spins, and Buffy has to catch him before he totters, her arms around his shoulders, his waist.
Slowly, they three-legged race in the door, up the stairs. Angel’s hands are clumsy with the fine movement of grasping his keys, so Buffy takes them from him and unlocks his door.
“Thanks,” he says. “Come in?”
Buffy hesitates at the threshold. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“I may need you to help me walk.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Thanks.”
Buffy closes the door behind them. Angel adjusts to standing on his own two feet, without Buffy supporting him. The world quivers a bit, but does not fall away.
“Thanks,” he says again.
“No problem,” Buffy says. Her fingers trail over the bulge of the keys in her pocket. Any distraction. “Did you really mean it?”
“I’m sorry,” Angel says. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“Oh,” Buffy says. “You make me uncomfortable.” Angel looks crushed, so Buffy adds quickly: “But in a really nice way.”
“I meant it,” Angel says, softly. “About kissing you.”
There’s no telling what’s come over her. He’s her partner, and it’s stupid. But suddenly she has Angel by the lapels of his totally hot leather jacket, and she is crushing her mouth to his. Salty, sweet, raw, the taste of him sparking something feral in her blood. Angel makes a small, rent noise in the back of his throat, and Buffy feels his hands come up, rest against her arms. He isn’t pushing, and he isn’t embracing her; it’s an indecisive movement, and somewhere in the back of her mind Buffy is surprised by his gentleness, but in the forefront there is only the wild sweet taste of him, the sensation of his mouth on hers, his body against hers, under her hands.
She pushes him back, and he lets himself be led, and they dance like this until Angel’s broad shoulders meet the wall, and then there is no resistance to their kiss, only the physical reality of the building holding them up. Buffy can feel Angel relax, and his fingers trail along the bare skin of her arms, the ticklish sides of her ribs, until his hands curl around her waist, pulling her against him.
And then their dizziness is not only becoming drunk in the kiss, but also lack of oxygen, and they part, by millimeters. One of Buffy’s hands tangles in Angel’s hair, and he tickles the ultrasensitive corner of her swollen lips as his move to speak, they are so close.
“Um,” Angel says softly, and then chuckles.
Buffy giggles. She meets his eyes. Angel is regarding her with a calm, even gaze.
“Just so you know, boss,” Buffy says, “I did complete the sexual harassment seminar.”
Angel looks at her for a long moment, looks at her like looking through her. Not x-ray vision, just some profound Zen monk understanding. And then he brings one hand up, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear. The other hand becomes a pleasantly insistent pressure at the small of her back, holding her body firm against his, and Angel leans down and kisses her, softly. The sensation, the feel and taste and headiness of him, drives all of Buffy’s patience from her, and her hands tighten their grasp on the bit of leather lapel and the curls of his hair and she deepens the kiss, starving for him.
After an intense, breathless moment, she feels Angel shift beneath her. He turns his face away; he is flushed, out of breath. They are both flushed, and out of breath, but Angel is not meeting her eyes and suddenly Buffy feels a cold knot of dread condense in her stomach.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry-are you . . . is this a politics thing? Are you worried about if the chief finds out?”
Angel looks up at her, surprise and guilt battling on his face.
“No,” he says. “No, the chief married his secretary, so that is . . . not even on my worried radar. It’s just-I, well I wanted-” Oh God. Is he blushing? “It’s just, since my wife-it’s been a long time since I was . . . intimate . . . with anyone . . .”
The dread knot dissolves and Buffy just feels confused. And frustrated.
“But we weren’t . . . that wasn’t intimate,” she says. “That was just kissing.”
Now Angel is definitely blushing. “Well, I haven’t done that in a long time, either.”
“Oh.” Buffy releases Angel’s lapel, lets her hands rest lightly on his hips. She presses a soft, chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth. “That’s okay.” His lips. “We’ll go really-” She kisses his mouth again, a little longer this time. “-really slow.”
Buffy can feel Angel relax beneath her. He kisses her.
“Slow can be good,” he says.
Buffy kisses him again. Slowly, close-mouthed at first, and then leisurely letting her tongue slip past Angel’s lips, exploring the shape and taste of him.
“Slow can be good,” Buffy says.
( Chapter Three through the End)