BtVS songfic: Award of Merit
Title: Award of Merit
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Not the characters and not the songs (N’Sync’s ‘Gone’, Jann Arden’s ‘Insensitive’, The Rankin Family’s performance of ‘O tha mo dhùil ruit’, or the Mediaeval Baebes’ ‘I am Eve’, and ‘Veni Coronaberis’).
Summary: Angel thinks about stuff leading up to an epiphany all B/Aers can agree with.
Distribution: Whoever wants it can have it.
Feedback: As always it goes to scwlc@yahoo.ca
Notes: I was channel flipping, and it occurred to me that the N’Sync song would probably drive Angel insane on several levels, so I decided to explore a bit of that. Also, a dedication to Smurfette, who is a wonderful feedbacker, Sharon Smith who is one of those really good authors I’m always surprised even bothers to write me feedback, to all those involved in running BA Fluff and the Babble board (and all those related offshoots of the Babble board), and to those authors who I never get around to feedbacking even though they really deserve it.
Angel lay on the sofa in his room at the Hyperion. Things were in a lull. Connor had come to accept his father, he had forgiven Wesley for taking his son, Wesley had gotten past his guilt for sleeping with the enemy and there appeared to be absolutely nothing on the horizon. Angel was planning on enjoying the respite.
He lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling for about four minutes before he got bored. That lead to him writing in his journal, bringing it up to date. He reorganised his room, read some of one of his books of poetry, then settled on turning on the radio while he settled in for a nap. He was damned if he was going to do anything while he had the chance to rest and relax without anyone around to tell him he was being to dark.
So, he turned on the radio, spun the knob to a station at random and listened as the music came on.
//And I’m sittin’ here
(sittin’ here)
Tryin’ to get you off my mind
(off my mind)//
The whiny boy band cut through his consciousness bringing thoughts of Buffy. She had like some of those boy bands. She had made him listen to them. Those were now some of his most cherished memories. They were of his lover smiling, laughing and playing. She had invited him into her world and for those beautiful moments he had been almost perfectly happy. Happy to bask in the warm glow that only she emitted and to absorb the peace he could only find with her.
The contrast between now, with the frequently cold comfort of friends, the still mistrustful glare of his son and the discomfort between him and Wesley and those days of innocent laughter was sharpened, and lead only to easily to the emptiness following her death. The lyrics chose to echo his pain.
//But the truth remains you’re
Gone//
He could still remember the horror of hearing that word fall from Willow’s lips.
//Girl you’re
Gone//
The way it echoed now, months after her return from the dead.
//Baby girl you’re
Gone//
The single word pounding in his head, intensifying the guilt of not being there.
//Girl you’re gone//
He snarled and turned the knob viciously to get another station. The instrumental relaxed him somewhat and he allowed his mind to drift. In spite of itself it went back to Buffy. She was alive now. Where he had failed to protect her, Willow had succeeded. Of course, he had always failed to protect her. He had wanted to keep her safe, comfort her when things were hard, make her life a little easier, save her heart from being broken. He had been the cause of most of her heartbreak in spite of all his good intentions.
//Well I really shoulda known
By the time you drove me home//
He had damaged her so much that one afternoon right after he lost his soul. She had come to his apartment for comfort and instead found a monster.
//By the vagueness in your eyes
Your casual goodbyes
By the chill in your embrace
The expression on your face//
He sometimes wondered how she could have missed the change in him, but that never lessened his guilt. The things he had said to her. The sin was compounded by so many other times he had hurt her. Intentionally or otherwise. Days before the prom when he broke up with her in a sewer because her mother asked him to, walking away from her in the aftermath of the Mayor’s ascension, defending Faith from her.
//That told me maybe you might have
Some advice to give
On how to be//
He remembered finding out later from Faith just how hard Buffy had tried to help the other slayer. The way the Faith had thrown it back in Buffy’s face, worse, had taken her body and slept with her boyfriend. He had felt doubly guilty when he arrived in Sunnydale to see that she clearly struggled with the ever jagged edges of her life. He had wanted to offer to help her fit them together the way he had in the past, but instead he left with a pathetic joke about how he didn’t like Riley.
//Insensitive.//
His hand reached for the dial and he spun it again. He was determined to get away from thoughts of Buffy. They made him depressed and he was trying to relax. Not brood. He settled again on another station.
//O tha mo dhùil ruit
(O I love you)
Tha’s bi mo dhùil ruit
(I do and always will love you)
‘Og a chuir mi ùidh
(I was young when I fell in love)
Ann an cùirtear ne féile
(With the generous young lad)//
The Gaelic melody washed over him, and despite it’s Scottish origins brought him back to his youth. He closed his eyes and relaxed into the song of a young woman waiting for the return of her lover. The way Buffy had promised to wait when he had tried to leave the night of her seventeenth birthday.
He drifted with the song, nearly helpless as memories of Buffy continued to rise to the surface. In spite of himself, perhaps because of the longing he never quite lost for a small Irish town where everyone knew everyone else it took him a little longer while listening to the song to reach for the knob.
//Mo run-sa cha tréig mi
(My love will not desert me)//
The wash of guilt again had him reaching for the dial.
The mediaeval sound of recorders had him breathing a sigh of relief. He at least wouldn’t suffer from guilty conscience to the sounds of a mediaeval instrumental. He settled back into the cushions.
//Mé Éva ben Adaim uill;
(I am Eve, great Adam’s wife)
mé ro sáraig Ísu thall;
(it is I that outraged Jesus of old)//
Darla had been so proud in her time as a vampire of her reputation. She had been proud to be called a whore by Holtz. He could still recall with great clarity her mocking laughter the first time he had said it as though he had expected her to be affronted.
//mé ro thall nem ar mo chloinn:
(it is I that stole Heaven from my children)//
She had certainly taken away any chance he had ever had at attaining Heaven. Her appearance in that Galway alley had sealed his fate. As unlikely as it had been at the time he could have made up for his many sins, when her fangs had pierced his neck in the darkness behind the pub, there was no hope for salvation.
//cóir is mé do-chóid sa crann.
(by rights it is I that should have gone upon the Tree)//
How he had suffered for that fateful choice. And yet he would not have passed up that suffering for an instant if it meant he would never have Buffy. That thought made his eyes snap open and his hand fumble for the knob.
//Ivy is soft and mek of spech,
(Ivy is soft of speech, and mild,)
Ageinst all bale she is blysse.
(In the face of evil she stands for good.)//
Angel sat up. Those same women were also on the new station. Instead of singing a lament of Eve, they were singing this. Buffy was anything but meek and soft-spoken, but it was true she stood for all that was good in the face of evil.
//Well is he that her rech.
(He who attains her is blessed indeed.)
Veni, coronaberis.
(Come, you shall be crowned.)//
He just wasn’t going to escape his thoughts of her tonight.
So, as was distinctly not his wont, Angel sat down and began to think through his memories of Buffy. Maybe if he actually worked through what was bothering him he could relax without this tooth grinding reminder of everything he couldn’t have. He shut off the radio, took up a sketchbook, and started to doodle as he thought.
He had spent close to a century feeling guilty and hiding from the world. When he saw Buffy, he felt drawn to her in a way that even now he could not explain. At the time all he knew was that he wanted to protect her from those things which had made her cry, tears which fell upon his heart like drops of holy water. Whistler had promised he knew a way to help the girl, so Angel had done what the irritating demon asked. Anything for her.
It became his mantra.
The evening in Sunnydale when she knocked him on his back, he had resorted to the faint mockery of his every action to hide the joy he had felt at simply being in contact with her. She had spoken to him, had listened to him, and he had fallen so deeply in love with her, he almost forgot what it was like to be otherwise. Buffy filled his thoughts, his dreams and eventually his apartment. He had sketches of her crammed in every spare space. Hidden, lest someone or something enter his apartment and try to hurt the small blonde girl as a way to hurt him, later hidden so that she wouldn’t find them and be frightened.
By then of course, she came to his place so frequently her smell had embedded itself in everything in the place. The couch, his bed, (how many times had he buried his nose in those sheets she had slept on hiding from the Order of Taraka?), anything she touched. It was even more inherent to the mansion. By the time he had made his decision to leave, she had made her mark there. It had been transformed from a place where he stayed to rest and hide from the sun into ‘theirs’. Her essence permeated the very air of the building.
His hands were already smoothing over the drawing of Buffy in front of him. Two more deftly drawn lines and it was done. Nowhere near as beautiful as the subject, this drawing didn’t move, laugh or hold any of the vitality of the model. Already he was ripping it from the book and starting a new drawing.
He knew that he would never be able to escape her memory. She was the first woman he had ever loved. She was the only woman he had ever loved. And he loved everything about her. The way her nose was ever so slightly snubbed, her hazel eyes, how she would always use pop culture references that left him baffled, and the confused look in her eyes when he responded with cultural references of his time. He had loved helping her with her history and English homework and listening to her complain about her math teacher. Every moment was cherished in memory.
Even those painful remembrances of time spent as a monster mocking her and trying to drive her mad were, in a way, his most deeply loved memories. While he loved to look back on those last fleeting days before they found out about the loophole in his curse, he also loved to look back on the strength his love had shown. She was at her most beautiful and vibrant in that moment after she kicked him in the balls and told him to give her time. The quiet strength in her face at that moment strengthened him in his weakest moments.
He had sometimes wondered whether she would ever find herself someone who could love that part of her the way he did, but always reminded himself that he had left her so she could find someone to have a real relationship with instead of the floundering thing they had. Besides, he couldn’t imagine anyone not loving every part of her. She was so magnificent, so amazing, he couldn’t begin to comprehend how it was that first that Parker boy and then Riley had treated her as they had.
If he ever caught up with that vampire-whoring bastard he was going to eviscerate him with a butter knife. Parker he would just drop off a cliff, but Riley deserved special treatment. How could they not see how wonderful she was? Then again, so many boys seemed to ignore her, despite the beauty and accomplishment of his love. And he could see that many of them never saw her the way he did, in her element as one of the most skilled and deadly hunters on the face of the earth.
Actually, the only person he had ever met other than himself who saw her that way had been Spike. And she had slept with Spike.
Angel shook off the jealousy. That line of thought was taking him nowhere. He needed to try another tack. Ten more sketches littered the floor.
He ripped the eleventh sketch of Buffy off the pad and started from the beginning with Darla. She had turned him. Changed him into a soulless and heartless monster. So many horrors had been racked up over his time as a vampire, sometimes they blurred into a grim mass of agony and guilt.
What was worst was the sense in which he was watching a stranger commit those crimes with his hands. He would never have done such things, and yet there he was doing them. He could recall the glee he had felt as he felt his little sister’s neck give way in his hands. Hands that had always protected her from whatever harm she might face. He closed his eyes trying to bock out the dull crunch that was suddenly Jenny Calendar as she just tried to right a wrong she had never committed. He had always wished he could have assured her he never blamed her for the loss of his soul.
He tried so hard to make up for his sins even though he never could. Even though he’d never really committed them.
That thought, so alien to his mind stopped him in his figurative tracks. He’d never really committed those sins. He hadn’t. Oh sure, he’d wanted to break his father’s neck from time to time, but he hadn’t. In point of fact, he’d never blamed anyone who became a vampire for what the vampire did. The original person was dead, how could he blame them?
How could he blame himself?
He had been essentially dead when the vampire with his face had acted on one of his more forbidden wishes and killed the older man.
With those bizarre thoughts running through his head, Angel began to review everything he’d ever thought. His whole world turned on it’s head. If Buffy couldn’t find anyone but him who loved her and saw her and treated her the way she ought to be, then she ought to be with him. It was so simple. She had told him repeatedly that she loved him and wanted to be with him. If he was what she wanted, and he wanted it too, who was he to argue?
All the reasons he had ever invented to keep them apart came under reexamination. Angel was practically catatonic as his mind raced with this sudden understanding. It was as though a light had been turned on in his head.
Then the light clicked off. None of it mattered. The real reason he had left stood. The only thing keeping him apart from his lover was the loophole in his curse. That one thing was an insurmountable barrier.
“Not quite insurmountable, Warrior.”
Angel’s head snapped up and he gawped like a yokel country cousin come to London for the first time. “Hunh?” he said.
The female Oracle smiled at him as she stood in the midst of his pile of paper. “I was wondering how long it would take you to reach this point of enlightenment," she said, her head tilted to the side. “Of course, I thought it would be just a *little* sooner.” Her eyes narrowed slightly in emphasis.
Angel finally recovered his vocal abilities, “Why are you here? Aren’t you dead?” His brain hadn’t caught up with his mouth unfortunately.
She simply straightened her head and replied, “What is beyond death cannot truly die.” Then her smile widened and she continued, “I am here because you have at last earned your shanshu.”
Angel raised an eyebrow and decided that, despite the raging excitement within him, he was going to, just this once, come out of a talk with the Powers’ representative looking somewhat together. So he waited, his face showing none of his impatience or bafflement and instead cool curiosity.
That brought a chuckle from her, “I see you have reached a level of . . . calm you did not have before as well. As to what you wish to know, I will say solely this. You had forgiveness from all but one. It was that one from whom you required it.” With that confusing statement, she waved her hand, driving him to his knees as his bodily functions resumed.
When he was able to look up again, he was alone. And human.
He was human.
Angel was down the stairs and in his car before he realised he was on his way to Sunnydale. He paused just long enough to shout to his confused friends who were running after him, “I’m going back to Buffy!” before he stepped on the gas.
After all, he’d earned it.
Fin
Read what happened to Buffy
Skip to the happy ending
Back to archive page
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Not the characters and not the songs (N’Sync’s ‘Gone’, Jann Arden’s ‘Insensitive’, The Rankin Family’s performance of ‘O tha mo dhùil ruit’, or the Mediaeval Baebes’ ‘I am Eve’, and ‘Veni Coronaberis’).
Summary: Angel thinks about stuff leading up to an epiphany all B/Aers can agree with.
Distribution: Whoever wants it can have it.
Feedback: As always it goes to scwlc@yahoo.ca
Notes: I was channel flipping, and it occurred to me that the N’Sync song would probably drive Angel insane on several levels, so I decided to explore a bit of that. Also, a dedication to Smurfette, who is a wonderful feedbacker, Sharon Smith who is one of those really good authors I’m always surprised even bothers to write me feedback, to all those involved in running BA Fluff and the Babble board (and all those related offshoots of the Babble board), and to those authors who I never get around to feedbacking even though they really deserve it.
Angel lay on the sofa in his room at the Hyperion. Things were in a lull. Connor had come to accept his father, he had forgiven Wesley for taking his son, Wesley had gotten past his guilt for sleeping with the enemy and there appeared to be absolutely nothing on the horizon. Angel was planning on enjoying the respite.
He lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling for about four minutes before he got bored. That lead to him writing in his journal, bringing it up to date. He reorganised his room, read some of one of his books of poetry, then settled on turning on the radio while he settled in for a nap. He was damned if he was going to do anything while he had the chance to rest and relax without anyone around to tell him he was being to dark.
So, he turned on the radio, spun the knob to a station at random and listened as the music came on.
//And I’m sittin’ here
(sittin’ here)
Tryin’ to get you off my mind
(off my mind)//
The whiny boy band cut through his consciousness bringing thoughts of Buffy. She had like some of those boy bands. She had made him listen to them. Those were now some of his most cherished memories. They were of his lover smiling, laughing and playing. She had invited him into her world and for those beautiful moments he had been almost perfectly happy. Happy to bask in the warm glow that only she emitted and to absorb the peace he could only find with her.
The contrast between now, with the frequently cold comfort of friends, the still mistrustful glare of his son and the discomfort between him and Wesley and those days of innocent laughter was sharpened, and lead only to easily to the emptiness following her death. The lyrics chose to echo his pain.
//But the truth remains you’re
Gone//
He could still remember the horror of hearing that word fall from Willow’s lips.
//Girl you’re
Gone//
The way it echoed now, months after her return from the dead.
//Baby girl you’re
Gone//
The single word pounding in his head, intensifying the guilt of not being there.
//Girl you’re gone//
He snarled and turned the knob viciously to get another station. The instrumental relaxed him somewhat and he allowed his mind to drift. In spite of itself it went back to Buffy. She was alive now. Where he had failed to protect her, Willow had succeeded. Of course, he had always failed to protect her. He had wanted to keep her safe, comfort her when things were hard, make her life a little easier, save her heart from being broken. He had been the cause of most of her heartbreak in spite of all his good intentions.
//Well I really shoulda known
By the time you drove me home//
He had damaged her so much that one afternoon right after he lost his soul. She had come to his apartment for comfort and instead found a monster.
//By the vagueness in your eyes
Your casual goodbyes
By the chill in your embrace
The expression on your face//
He sometimes wondered how she could have missed the change in him, but that never lessened his guilt. The things he had said to her. The sin was compounded by so many other times he had hurt her. Intentionally or otherwise. Days before the prom when he broke up with her in a sewer because her mother asked him to, walking away from her in the aftermath of the Mayor’s ascension, defending Faith from her.
//That told me maybe you might have
Some advice to give
On how to be//
He remembered finding out later from Faith just how hard Buffy had tried to help the other slayer. The way the Faith had thrown it back in Buffy’s face, worse, had taken her body and slept with her boyfriend. He had felt doubly guilty when he arrived in Sunnydale to see that she clearly struggled with the ever jagged edges of her life. He had wanted to offer to help her fit them together the way he had in the past, but instead he left with a pathetic joke about how he didn’t like Riley.
//Insensitive.//
His hand reached for the dial and he spun it again. He was determined to get away from thoughts of Buffy. They made him depressed and he was trying to relax. Not brood. He settled again on another station.
//O tha mo dhùil ruit
(O I love you)
Tha’s bi mo dhùil ruit
(I do and always will love you)
‘Og a chuir mi ùidh
(I was young when I fell in love)
Ann an cùirtear ne féile
(With the generous young lad)//
The Gaelic melody washed over him, and despite it’s Scottish origins brought him back to his youth. He closed his eyes and relaxed into the song of a young woman waiting for the return of her lover. The way Buffy had promised to wait when he had tried to leave the night of her seventeenth birthday.
He drifted with the song, nearly helpless as memories of Buffy continued to rise to the surface. In spite of himself, perhaps because of the longing he never quite lost for a small Irish town where everyone knew everyone else it took him a little longer while listening to the song to reach for the knob.
//Mo run-sa cha tréig mi
(My love will not desert me)//
The wash of guilt again had him reaching for the dial.
The mediaeval sound of recorders had him breathing a sigh of relief. He at least wouldn’t suffer from guilty conscience to the sounds of a mediaeval instrumental. He settled back into the cushions.
//Mé Éva ben Adaim uill;
(I am Eve, great Adam’s wife)
mé ro sáraig Ísu thall;
(it is I that outraged Jesus of old)//
Darla had been so proud in her time as a vampire of her reputation. She had been proud to be called a whore by Holtz. He could still recall with great clarity her mocking laughter the first time he had said it as though he had expected her to be affronted.
//mé ro thall nem ar mo chloinn:
(it is I that stole Heaven from my children)//
She had certainly taken away any chance he had ever had at attaining Heaven. Her appearance in that Galway alley had sealed his fate. As unlikely as it had been at the time he could have made up for his many sins, when her fangs had pierced his neck in the darkness behind the pub, there was no hope for salvation.
//cóir is mé do-chóid sa crann.
(by rights it is I that should have gone upon the Tree)//
How he had suffered for that fateful choice. And yet he would not have passed up that suffering for an instant if it meant he would never have Buffy. That thought made his eyes snap open and his hand fumble for the knob.
//Ivy is soft and mek of spech,
(Ivy is soft of speech, and mild,)
Ageinst all bale she is blysse.
(In the face of evil she stands for good.)//
Angel sat up. Those same women were also on the new station. Instead of singing a lament of Eve, they were singing this. Buffy was anything but meek and soft-spoken, but it was true she stood for all that was good in the face of evil.
//Well is he that her rech.
(He who attains her is blessed indeed.)
Veni, coronaberis.
(Come, you shall be crowned.)//
He just wasn’t going to escape his thoughts of her tonight.
So, as was distinctly not his wont, Angel sat down and began to think through his memories of Buffy. Maybe if he actually worked through what was bothering him he could relax without this tooth grinding reminder of everything he couldn’t have. He shut off the radio, took up a sketchbook, and started to doodle as he thought.
He had spent close to a century feeling guilty and hiding from the world. When he saw Buffy, he felt drawn to her in a way that even now he could not explain. At the time all he knew was that he wanted to protect her from those things which had made her cry, tears which fell upon his heart like drops of holy water. Whistler had promised he knew a way to help the girl, so Angel had done what the irritating demon asked. Anything for her.
It became his mantra.
The evening in Sunnydale when she knocked him on his back, he had resorted to the faint mockery of his every action to hide the joy he had felt at simply being in contact with her. She had spoken to him, had listened to him, and he had fallen so deeply in love with her, he almost forgot what it was like to be otherwise. Buffy filled his thoughts, his dreams and eventually his apartment. He had sketches of her crammed in every spare space. Hidden, lest someone or something enter his apartment and try to hurt the small blonde girl as a way to hurt him, later hidden so that she wouldn’t find them and be frightened.
By then of course, she came to his place so frequently her smell had embedded itself in everything in the place. The couch, his bed, (how many times had he buried his nose in those sheets she had slept on hiding from the Order of Taraka?), anything she touched. It was even more inherent to the mansion. By the time he had made his decision to leave, she had made her mark there. It had been transformed from a place where he stayed to rest and hide from the sun into ‘theirs’. Her essence permeated the very air of the building.
His hands were already smoothing over the drawing of Buffy in front of him. Two more deftly drawn lines and it was done. Nowhere near as beautiful as the subject, this drawing didn’t move, laugh or hold any of the vitality of the model. Already he was ripping it from the book and starting a new drawing.
He knew that he would never be able to escape her memory. She was the first woman he had ever loved. She was the only woman he had ever loved. And he loved everything about her. The way her nose was ever so slightly snubbed, her hazel eyes, how she would always use pop culture references that left him baffled, and the confused look in her eyes when he responded with cultural references of his time. He had loved helping her with her history and English homework and listening to her complain about her math teacher. Every moment was cherished in memory.
Even those painful remembrances of time spent as a monster mocking her and trying to drive her mad were, in a way, his most deeply loved memories. While he loved to look back on those last fleeting days before they found out about the loophole in his curse, he also loved to look back on the strength his love had shown. She was at her most beautiful and vibrant in that moment after she kicked him in the balls and told him to give her time. The quiet strength in her face at that moment strengthened him in his weakest moments.
He had sometimes wondered whether she would ever find herself someone who could love that part of her the way he did, but always reminded himself that he had left her so she could find someone to have a real relationship with instead of the floundering thing they had. Besides, he couldn’t imagine anyone not loving every part of her. She was so magnificent, so amazing, he couldn’t begin to comprehend how it was that first that Parker boy and then Riley had treated her as they had.
If he ever caught up with that vampire-whoring bastard he was going to eviscerate him with a butter knife. Parker he would just drop off a cliff, but Riley deserved special treatment. How could they not see how wonderful she was? Then again, so many boys seemed to ignore her, despite the beauty and accomplishment of his love. And he could see that many of them never saw her the way he did, in her element as one of the most skilled and deadly hunters on the face of the earth.
Actually, the only person he had ever met other than himself who saw her that way had been Spike. And she had slept with Spike.
Angel shook off the jealousy. That line of thought was taking him nowhere. He needed to try another tack. Ten more sketches littered the floor.
He ripped the eleventh sketch of Buffy off the pad and started from the beginning with Darla. She had turned him. Changed him into a soulless and heartless monster. So many horrors had been racked up over his time as a vampire, sometimes they blurred into a grim mass of agony and guilt.
What was worst was the sense in which he was watching a stranger commit those crimes with his hands. He would never have done such things, and yet there he was doing them. He could recall the glee he had felt as he felt his little sister’s neck give way in his hands. Hands that had always protected her from whatever harm she might face. He closed his eyes trying to bock out the dull crunch that was suddenly Jenny Calendar as she just tried to right a wrong she had never committed. He had always wished he could have assured her he never blamed her for the loss of his soul.
He tried so hard to make up for his sins even though he never could. Even though he’d never really committed them.
That thought, so alien to his mind stopped him in his figurative tracks. He’d never really committed those sins. He hadn’t. Oh sure, he’d wanted to break his father’s neck from time to time, but he hadn’t. In point of fact, he’d never blamed anyone who became a vampire for what the vampire did. The original person was dead, how could he blame them?
How could he blame himself?
He had been essentially dead when the vampire with his face had acted on one of his more forbidden wishes and killed the older man.
With those bizarre thoughts running through his head, Angel began to review everything he’d ever thought. His whole world turned on it’s head. If Buffy couldn’t find anyone but him who loved her and saw her and treated her the way she ought to be, then she ought to be with him. It was so simple. She had told him repeatedly that she loved him and wanted to be with him. If he was what she wanted, and he wanted it too, who was he to argue?
All the reasons he had ever invented to keep them apart came under reexamination. Angel was practically catatonic as his mind raced with this sudden understanding. It was as though a light had been turned on in his head.
Then the light clicked off. None of it mattered. The real reason he had left stood. The only thing keeping him apart from his lover was the loophole in his curse. That one thing was an insurmountable barrier.
“Not quite insurmountable, Warrior.”
Angel’s head snapped up and he gawped like a yokel country cousin come to London for the first time. “Hunh?” he said.
The female Oracle smiled at him as she stood in the midst of his pile of paper. “I was wondering how long it would take you to reach this point of enlightenment," she said, her head tilted to the side. “Of course, I thought it would be just a *little* sooner.” Her eyes narrowed slightly in emphasis.
Angel finally recovered his vocal abilities, “Why are you here? Aren’t you dead?” His brain hadn’t caught up with his mouth unfortunately.
She simply straightened her head and replied, “What is beyond death cannot truly die.” Then her smile widened and she continued, “I am here because you have at last earned your shanshu.”
Angel raised an eyebrow and decided that, despite the raging excitement within him, he was going to, just this once, come out of a talk with the Powers’ representative looking somewhat together. So he waited, his face showing none of his impatience or bafflement and instead cool curiosity.
That brought a chuckle from her, “I see you have reached a level of . . . calm you did not have before as well. As to what you wish to know, I will say solely this. You had forgiveness from all but one. It was that one from whom you required it.” With that confusing statement, she waved her hand, driving him to his knees as his bodily functions resumed.
When he was able to look up again, he was alone. And human.
He was human.
Angel was down the stairs and in his car before he realised he was on his way to Sunnydale. He paused just long enough to shout to his confused friends who were running after him, “I’m going back to Buffy!” before he stepped on the gas.
After all, he’d earned it.
Fin
Read what happened to Buffy
Skip to the happy ending
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