Fic: Before the World Falls Down (BtVS/AtS)

[theredwepainted]

Before the World Falls Down
Once we had a love affair with solar satellites.
Star crossed for too many years, till our distance grew twice as wide,
And we were caught with the moon in a cosmic compromise.

(Though our tongues are cut on paper,
We are sure that's just the danger of our song.
We set fires but run from nature,
We're sure that this is where we belong.)

Five.

(He spends his nights patrolling, his days pacing the empty corridors. Around him, the slayers share wary glances, and they move aside when he walks. Sometimes they reach for their weapons, instinctively. He knows his presence unnerves them. It's fair enough. Their presence unnerves him, too.

Sometimes, he catches himself thinking like the old man he is. In his day, he thinks, there was only one, and she knew his face, and his name - every slayer since the day he was reborn has known that, until now. Now there are too many, and the name "Angelus" no longer strikes fear into the hearts of the Chosen. Angel is grateful for that, at least.

He isn't grateful for the nightmares.

At first, he doesn't tell anyone about them; eventually, he tells Spike.

It's the Slayer Army's technology, its magic, that lets them find Spike to begin with. They track him down in Paris, smoking French cigarettes and dressed in black. His hair's changed - a bit of brown in the roots, just along the edges, but his swagger hasn't. Spike says, "Angel," in that same working class affect, that bullshit dialect he adopted centuries ago, and Angel hates how glad he is to hear it.

They drink together at a pub in misty-damn London, old buddies, or something close. They drink, and Angel tells him the end is here. He says, "I see it my dreams, Spike. We should have left the city in Hell. We started something bad."

Spike shrugs watching Angel over the rim of his beer mug. "All right," he says, "So we buggered it up and now the whole world's gone pear-shaped. What else is new?"

Angel doesn't say that he's tired of hearing that this is nothing different, nothing worse, because he's not sure it's true. Because even if it isn't, they can't stop it if they don't understand it. And he thinks of his nightmares - the rivers of blood, and the flash of blonde hair behind the closing pits of Hell. He says, "Can we count on you to give us a hand?" Spike blows cigarette smoke in Angel's face. Angel doesn't breathe it in. "Buffy could use your help, too." It's a bit of a low blow, and he knows it. He isn't even sure it will work.

But Spike takes a long drag and orders another beer. His face is tense, his eyes downcast, and there's a shadow lingering over his features, like the ghost of a memory.

Spike says, "Well, it seems you can find me. If there are any giants or ogres or... t-rexes clomping about... you can always give me a ring."

Angel leaves Spike in the shadows of a corner table, and calls for the helicopter to bring him home before dawn.)

* * *

"It's written in the pages of divine law. It's written between the hand-scrawled lines of the oldest testament, that there will come a reckoning. That someday, each of us will be judged for who we are and what we've done, the fields we've sown and reaped, the fruits of our labor and what we have shared. It's written on the soul - that deep and undeniable knowledge that there will come a day when judgment comes down upon the human race with all the weight of heaven and hell. That the Earth will open wide and show its teeth, and we will all face the truth of who we are, what we've done.

"And so the cycle begins again. The rapture of change. The blood of sinners and the saved, the guilty and the innocent, the sacrifice that brings forth a new age, a new dawn. The coming of a new world sculpted by the hands of powers far greater than that of man.

"It is written, and so it shall pass."

(Buffy swallows down her last sip of orange juice. She turns off the television and watches Mr. Preacherman's face as it vanishes into black.)

* * *

They go to Venice by nightfall, where the water is hot, though the air is freezing. Buffy and Angel, together again. She isn't sure when they became a "they," in the fighting partners way not the other way (at least she's pretty sure it isn't the other way), but it doesn't matter. They work together well, and if their battles were a once duet now, joined by other slayers, they've become a symphony.

The sky is pink and streaked with grey clouds, and it's almost midnight. Faith is already there, all black leather jacket and black jeans, chestnut hair blowing in her eyes. Buffy wants to say she doesn't hesitate at the sight of her. Buffy wants to say she's learned to trust again, but she hasn't, not fully. It's unfair, in a way, how she forgives everyone so easily, except for Faith. But it's visceral, and it's a wound that never closes, and every time Faith does something questionable, it opens again. So Angel talks to her while Buffy scans the area for water-boiling demons, or demons of flames or volcanism or something else with water-boiling potential.

She glances over her shoulder as she leaves - taking in the sight of them, Faith and Angel talking, their close stance, another "they" that she can't be a part of. It reminds her, unpleasantly, of Angel and Faith in the mansion where he hid; it reminds her of them in Angel's apartment and goodbyes that could have been forever. For a split second, a white hot shard of hate lodges in her gut, and then it passes away. It was years ago. It was years ago, and longer for him. That's the saddest part: he probably doesn't even remember.

She walks the streets of Venice, those beautiful, romantic roads of crumbling stone and isolated walls immersed in the dirty canal water, and her mind is full. She's been here before, and yet somehow she's never really seen it. That's the way it is with everywhere she's been in the world she was born to save but has no time to explore. Even now, she can't linger. Still, somewhere, in the distance, music seeps through the streets, soft and sad and haunting and she can appreciate that, at least.

Buffy finds two vampires in an alley, laughing over the corpse of a fur-wrapped young man. When she leaves the alley, she's covered in dust and her fingers are cold from pressing the poor man's eyelids down. She whispers goodnight as she walks away, the Scythe's handle warm under her palms.

Angel finds her at the edge of the city, staring into the steaming water and humming along with the music of the streets. He says, "Faith hasn't been able to find anything. We took a look around but..."

Above them, the helicopter draws near, and Buffy raises her voice over the sound of its propeller, swiping hair from her eyes. "I didn't find anything either. There were a few stray vampires, but no demons, no witches. Satsu found a werewolf in a corner but that's about it." She looks at him. "Doesn't that mean..."

Angel looks at her from the side of his eye. "Generalizing supernatural phenomena."

Her stomach sinks, and her hands tense around the Scythe.

Satsu arrives with Faith and the shackled werewolf; Buffy doesn't know what to say to Faith, so she just mumbles her thanks as she scrambles into the copter, pulling the struggling woman-wolf behind her. Inside, Angel's face turns to the window, and Buffy traces his gaze to the tiny form of Faith waving from the ground. Around her, the air is filling up with steam from the waters. It looks like a drawing from one of Xander's comic books - picture of the heroine just before the world falls down.

Buffy rests her hand on Angel's as Faith disappears from view.

When they get back to Scotland, there's blood in the hallways. Crimson smears - fresh, and dark brown stains where blood has dried, too. Angel grabs an axe from the wall and Buffy moves The Scythe into a defensive position. The halls are quiet, abandoned still full of upturned furniture, with deep gashes through the softer woods - the tables, the chairs. Tracking the blood through the castle, they find five torn open bodies, and in the cellar, the guards set to watch over the werewolf prisoners, or patients, they're torn open too. The ground is littered with shards of glass, sparks of broken magic shimmering and dissipating into the air.

Angel picks up a shard, heavy and still buzzing with energy. "I thought you said they couldn't get through the glass."

Buffy shakes her head. "They couldn't."

Angel drives the glass hard into the stone wall. Chips of stone fall to the ground; the glass doesn't shatter.

Cold and hot panic surge through Buffy's blood in waves, and she searches the entire building, every inch. She finds most of the slayers shaking in the observation room, Xander serving drinks, Willow tending to wounds.

Kaya looks up, red-faced. "It was too fast. We didn't even have time to react," she says. "It was just too fast."

* * *

She doesn't know how they end up in her room, her legs tucked under her arms, her hair in her eyes and on her shoulders. She doesn't know how they got there, but Angel sits on the edge of her bed, inches from her, and she's glad they did.

Her room is still soft colors and light woods; a haven of warmth amidst the stone walls. Angel says, "You never change." He smiles, and she almost thinks that's a good thing.

"Someone's got to be dependable, right? It used to be good old dependable Will. Then she got with the magic mojo and now it's me." She wiggles her feet in their socks; outside the wind is blowing hard, and the trees shake their skeletal limbs. "I'm not that good at it, though. I wasn't really made to be a leader."

Angel shakes his head. "Yes, you were."

Buffy leans against the wall behind her bed. "How did you get out, anyway?"

Angel furrows his brow; it takes a moment to understand. Even when he does, it takes a moment to answer. Then, "A seventh generation witch." He watches her face, then picks up one of the smaller pillows that adorn the head of her bed. "We had to find books that would explain the spell. And then we had to raise witches. Teach them, teach their children. For seven generations." In his hands, the pillow bops a little from one side to the other. He watches it, instead of her.

Buffy stares at him. "You were there for seven generations?"

He stops moving. "No. It took a few decades to find the books, figure out what to do with them, before we could start."

Suddenly, she wants to cry. She wants to hold him, or apologize for not being his hero. For not being able to find him, to march into Hell and pull him back. But she doesn't know what to say, and she can't move. Maybe she's been General Buffy for so long she's forgotten how to be woman Buffy, girl Buffy. The Buffy that laughed and cried and loved...

Loved him. She watches him in his silence and isolation. The way he's alone, even in a room of people, even with her.

The air is chilly - castles are drafty, and Buffy pulls a blanket around her shoulders; Angel adjusts it, tucking it closer to her chin. His skin is cool, like the air. She says, "When I found out you were working with Wolfram and Hart, I guess I kind of assumed you went--"

"Bad again?" He draws away, slowly.

"Yeah. I should have had more faith in you."

"Not really." He shakes his head. "Buffy, you weren't wrong. I mean you were wrong about my intentions, but not about what I was doing. I thought Wolfram and Hart could be... like the demon in me. A force of evil, put to good use by a soul. My soul. Yeah. I was in a bit over my head. It was too much for me. So I tried to undo it, and..."

"That went icky too."

He laughs, very quietly, almost silent. "Yeah. It went icky."

"That seems to be a theme. When good thoughts go icky." Surrounded by blankets and him, she feels so warm. "Where's Spike disappeared to, anyway?"

"I don't keep track of him. I don't keep track of any of them."

"Oh." She thinks of Spike, his bleached hair and long coat - the status symbol he cast off once, and then reclaimed. "Well, he'll turn up," She says, "He's Spike. He's like a bad case of the flu or something, he just keeps coming back and you think you're away from him and then boom you're all oogly again."

Angel looks at her. "You're oogly? About Spike?"

"It was just an example." Buffy looks up at the ceiling. She thinks about Spike's hands on her back, his mouth on her mouth, and she shudders from revulsion, desire, remembrance. Some combination of the three. It's weird how, with him, her heart is always mixed. Until him, she never thought you could almost love someone, and almost like them. You either did, or you didn't. That's how it made sense, wasn't it? Sometimes, she wonders if he remembers her.

Angel says, "I saw some old papers the other day. About you."

"Oh yeah. I'm totally a terrorist." She shrugs. "At least that's what I hear."

He smiles. "You are pretty terrifying."

"Only when I'm filled with wrathy vengeance."

Angel tugs the edge of her blanket. "You're pretty scary at other times, too."

* * *

When Buffy was a little girl, her social studies teacher put aside an entire section on mythologies of the ancient world. Zeus and Hera, Ra and Isis, Thor and Odin. She was eight, or maybe nine, and they used the old Encyclopedias in the back of the classroom to look up the Gods, and tell their myths. Their quarter-year project was a paper on the pantheon of their choice, or a myth that spanned multiple mythologies, like the floods that recur in so many stories of old, or the end of the world.

Buffy wrote about the creation of the universe. She doodled illustrations in the margins and pasted drawings over the top halves of pages - chaos giving birth to Gaea, and the sculpting of man from clays. She was fascinated by it all, these stories of creation and destruction, birth and rebirth, and she wished people still cared about Zeus and about Hera; about these gods of old worlds.

A little over ten years later, she met her first god.

Glory didn't really live up to the hype.

She's almost thirty, now, and she knows that folklore can be real. She's met Hansel and Gretel, after all; she's met Dracula (twice). And maybe somewhere out there, the other Gods do exist - the ones the people know. Or maybe they were just witches and warlocks; maybe they were demons.

Angel tells her about Illyria, sometimes, and how she was the God of Gods, the King of Death, the master of all, and how now she's just an immortal living in a human body, holding it together with the remnants of her power. But it's better that than dead, at least in theory. Immortals fight so hard to survive; harder than mortals - what's the loss of a few decades compared to the loss of forever? Maybe that's why so many of them are cowards.

And who could blame them? Why risk death, if you don't have to die?

Why face the void, if you don't have to?

* * *

When he sleeps he's so quiet, so still. It's like she's lying next to a corpse. She tries not to think about that too much. There are a world of reasons not to.

And Buffy knows he doesn't need to sleep at all, he just chooses to, sometimes. He doesn't want to spend hours in a world he can't join, and he doesn't want to spend hours alone. So he sleeps. And he's not alone now, with her there - though he is over the covers and she is under them, it's as close as they've ever been and she drapes her arm across his chest before she closes her eyes.

In her dreams, the world is still and a shadow creeps across the sky, blots out the sun. The shadow has red eyes, burning in the pitch-black of its face, its face like a dog's, like a wolf's.

And in her dreams, she hears the music again, like that night in Venice, still echoing in her head. The soundtrack of the end of days.

It's strange, but she doesn't wake up afraid.

It's 10 in the morning, and the sky is still black.

Six.

(They lie on her bed over the covers, hands entwined, staring at the ceiling. The light is golden and low, and the shadows scatter over the floor, lingering in corners and between the stones. She looks golden too, tonight.

"Angel. Do you believe in um, you know. All those crazy myths about the ferrymen, and the river of the dead?"

Charon, the river Styx. He learned those myths in his years of wandering, tasting the world with Darla, with Spike and Drusilla. He remembers how a universe opened up to him, then - a great flood of things he never knew in his years as the drunken man he had been, and in his great hunger he swallowed every story, every echo of the world he had now become a part of - that world of things he hadn't believed in, once.

"In a way. I've seen it. But nothing is ever as obvious as the myths make them out to be. The ancients didn't understand the other worlds any more than people do today. They only noticed it was there because they hadn't filled their minds with science, yet."

Over time, it lost a bit of its glamour.

"My 8th grade science teacher would be universes of offended."

"He shouldn't be. He-- He?"

Castle life, it's not that bad.

"She."

"She. I'm not saying science is wrong, Buffy. I'm just saying it's a mistake to assume that's all there is."

"Hey, I'm totally aware. Plus, you're talking to the very definition of scientific anomaly. I was just wondering..."

Except now there's the ghosts in the air. The slayers killed in their home. The chill of wind through the echoing corridors.

"If the world really is ending, do I have to keep a quarter in my pocket all the time?"

Angel laughs, and he hasn't laughed, truly laughed, in years. At least not in her presence.

"It wouldn't hurt."

She buries her head against his shoulder; her skin warm, her breath soft, laughing with him. He touches the back of her neck - warm skin and peach fuzz - and she trembles slightly at his touch. And he doesn't know when this happened, this strange and casual closeness, this dance along the edges of temptation. It may just be proof of what he's known all along: that it was better to be away. That if they were near each other, they would always fall together, for better or worse.

The air is thick and heavy on his chest. Buffy closes her eyes.

She says, "I don't really want to die, though." Her voice is small. He doesn't know what she's afraid of. It isn't death itself, he knows - she's seen it often enough to understand that death is not an ending, that she won't disappear even if she's gone. But even still she's entitled to fear, he thinks, everyone's entitled to that. So he pulls her a little closer, envelopes her in his arms, and she squeezes him just a little tighter than he does her.

She says, "I don't want you to die." Her voice is smaller still. Almost inaudible, even to him. And he understands. Her fear of endings, of separation again. The shattering of the tentative bond stretched between them. Because it's always pain with them, pain and the cut of the forbidden. He doesn't remember everything, but he remembers that cold realization: her notebooks covered in high school promises of forever, things she didn't want him to see but didn't think he would object to if he did. He remembers saying goodbye in the only way he could - no words, no touch. If he said one thing he would falter. If he heard her voice. He remembers that.

The light falls against his face; Buffy's hand is warm in his.

He's still holding her fingers in his palm when she falls asleep.)

* * *

On a Friday they meet in the conference room, gathered around the massive table, Giles at the head, Xander at the foot. Buffy lingers near Xander, but she turns her chair to face Giles. Maybe one day she'll figure out what she thinks of Giles, these days. Of course, for the moment, it doesn't matter. Her mind is cluttered with dark dreams and visions, and the blotting out of the sun; her ears are full of Giles' voice as he tells them that all of the mythologies are right, and then he tells them that all of the mythologies are wrong.

"Every culture looked at what they saw through the lens of their own understandings," he says, "So of course... a warrior culture envisions a great battle, and a culture that worshipped the sun might envision... the extinguishing of the sun."

"Oh great," Xander says, "A culture of Cordelias." Angel glares at him, and Xander mutters something quiet, inaudible.

Buffy glances from Xander to Angel, with their universes of difference and their odd similarity, too: they'd both loved Cordelia, in their time, just as they'd both loved Buffy herself. Though one had attained what the other only wished for with Cordy, and then with her, the reverse. Maybe that's cosmic equilibrium or something. Maybe Angel would have hit it off with Anya, if given the chance. The thought is kind of gross and creepy though, so she pushes her thoughts into the present.

Giles clears his throat. "Thank you for that charming detour into ten years ago, Xander, but I was trying to make the point that we may not find an exact prediction for this... specific crisis. We may find pieces of it scattered over many mythologies, many prophecies, and many legends. Interpreted... accurately, or inaccurately. It's difficult to know where to begin."

Willow wraps her fingers around a hot mug of herbal tea, and her eyes are shadowed and grim. "I dreamt about Tara. Last night. It was so real, like I could touch her. I woke up calling for her. Kennedy wasn't happy." She lifts her vast eyes, gaze on Giles. "I thought I was over it. I mean, as much as you can be. I haven't dreamt about her in years."

Buffy looks at the table.

Giles frowns, "What did she say?"

"She said she came to say goodbye."

Buffy doesn't mention that she dreamt, too. She dreamt of Spike waving as he walked into the sunset, and his hair wasn't white anymore, it was just... blond. She dreamt of Kendra singing a funeral dirge around a fire in the desert of Buffy's nightmares - that barren world where she met the First Slayer, once, and in the caves of the Scythe's containment. In the very last moments before she woke, she dreamt of Faith.

It's just a dream, she tells herself. Aside from Kendra, they aren't even dead.

Well, Spike is kind of dead. But still. It's just a dream.

* * *

When the Hellmouths start to yawn, Faith takes a team and heads back to Cleveland. In Rome, a Buffy double comes home in a body bag, and Buffy fends off the girl's angry Immortal lover for hours over the phone and then in the Conference room. She hangs up feeling like she's died again, and wishing she knew the double's name. Buffy sends Satsu to investigate Rome, after that. It makes sense that way: Faith lived in Cleveland, for a while, and Satsu stayed in Rome for a while, too, stationed with the Buffy-double who eventually became the Immortal's unlawfully wedded whatever. For a while.

As for Buffy herself, the real one, she volunteers to check Sunnydale. It just seems right. Of course, by all rights the Hellmouth in Sunnydale ought to be closed, kaput, shut forevermore. And yet the readings there are inconsistent but quite definitively not kaput. So maybe right doesn't have meaning anymore and Buffy should have just stayed in bed. Instead she and Angel drop down a pit God only knows how deep into the shadowy grave of their mutual former home. Well, her former home. Maybe he was only ever just a guest there.

All right, it's less a pit than a tunnel, dug by the government and upkept until the wolves came. Now the metal beams are rusting and creaking, and the muddy ground sloshes around their feet as they walk. Angel looks around the dark hole before Buffy lights an electric torch. What she wouldn't give for his night vision.

"Welcome back," she says.

"I have this weird habit of living in places that get swallowed by hell dimensions or collapse into hellmouths." Angel shakes his head and follows one step behind her through the rubble of overturned stoves and collapsed roofs. "This has got to be what Pompeii looked like."

Buffy glances back at him. "What?"

"Didn't you go to History class?"

"Forgive me, I had most of that stuff kicked out of me by demons." She holds the Scythe in one hand as she walks. "Volcano? In Italy."

"Yeah. Volcano in Italy."

Angel glances at her as they walk and even in the dark she feels his eyes on her. It's awkward, a little, and comfortable too; being here, being with him. It's almost like old times. Except for all the rubble and stuff, and how Sunnydale is in ruins. It's a strange, kind of heartbreaking thing to see. And it isn't that Buffy loved the town, really (although she did, in her way, a little). It's not that she misses all those midnight patrols through the graveyard (although she does a little bit, too). It's just that there's so much of her here, buried under tons of dirt and rock. Her house, and the school that replaced the school she went to. Sunnydale High II, the high school that only lived for a year. The Doublemeat Palace, and the Bronze. The broken headstones that mark the graves of dozens of vampires, now fallen into dust at her hand, and then... the crushed headstone of her mother.

Buffy stops there, palm against the cracked surface, and chokes back a sickening mingle of rage and grief. Angel presses his hands against her side, as if to hold her steady. She doesn't push him away, though she can stand on her own - she knows this even as she leans into him and doesn't cry.

"I kept reminding myself not to remember that she was here," Buffy says, and Angel strokes back her hair, tucking it behind her ear. His fingers are cool - not cold, not like ice, but cool like the air and soft too. Softer than she remembered. They always are. Vampires don't get calluses.

Angel says, "She's not just here. She's with you, too."

Buffy shakes her head. "That's really Celebrate-the-moments-of-our-lives of you. I am brimming with warm fuzzies and skepticism." She sighs a little. "But thanks."

Somewhere, covered in rubble, probably unrecognizable, her house is lost in the aftermath of war - the bedroom where Dawn grew up (didn't grow up), and the window where Angel kissed her that night when she wasn't allowed to leave the house. She tries not to think too hard about those things - the world they left behind when they saved the rest of it.

They sit in the dirt by her mother's grave, and Buffy brushes the soil from its surface, staring at the granite words - Joyce Summers. Beloved Mother. She leans against Angel's chest, wrapped in his coat the way she was after the funeral, when everything went cold and empty, and she wanted him to stay until the sun burnt out and fell into the sea. It's fitting, in a way, that he was there when that actually happened, in a metaphorical sense.

Angel's fingers rest in her hair, and she closes her eyes against the trace trickles of light, and her ears against the silence. She says, "Tell me about Connor."

For a long time, Angel doesn't say anything. He grows still, his fingers wrapped in her hair. "He was my son."

"I know. But he's gone now."

"I'm immortal. He wasn't." His hands withdraw, and the stuffy air is emptier now. Angel's face is drawn, and he looks away. "He's been gone before. I killed him, once. To save him. He was so angry, so... screwed up, he was a screwed up kid. It was my fault, Buffy, I should have protected him. I should have guided him. Instead, all I could do was let him go crazy and then let him go." His hand closes, a loose fist. "Like father like son."

She doesn't know if he means that Connor was like him, or that he was like his father. Sometimes, she remembers that, as well as she knows him, she doesn't know much about him - the him that was before there was a them. Or even the one that came after, developing in that office in LA, or in those magical windows of Wolfram and Hart. But she wraps her fingers around his hand, and hopes he takes comfort in her touch the way she has in his, a thousand times before tonight, and even here, now. Sitting on the ruins of her mother's grave.

They stay still for a while, maybe for too long, before they return to their duties. Across the broken street from the Bronze, she says, "It's easier not to miss stuff when you don't have to see it."

"Tell me about it." Angel's gaze is heavy on her shoulders.

Sometimes, when they're together, she still can't quite breathe. But she has to breathe; she has to walk. Through the dead and silent Bronze and the warehouse where Spike lived during his first time in Sunnydale. Down the street she walked with Angel while the snow fell, pale and silent, over the unnaturally dark roads. Through the shattered corpse of the new Sunnydale High School.

Buffy isn't sure what they're searching for - some sign of life or magic in this dead place. Something to explain the bizarre readings. But they turn corners and walk through shattered stone and still there is nothing.

They've almost given up searching when they hear the hiss.

* * *

(He carries her back to ground level, and he doesn't remember how he got there. He signals the helicopter and doesn't remember that, either. He remembers the bitter sting of wind on his face, and the blood dripping over his hands. He remembers hearing her scream.

Her head rests against his shoulders, and Angel tells her it's all right. She killed the thing, that... monster, whatever the hell it was. And now she's going to be all right. He tells her he brought that damn axe back too. Buffy shudders and says it's called the Scythe.

Angel closes his eyes, squeezes her hand. He says, "You're going to be all right.")

Seven.

(In Scotland, they stretch her out across the table, and Xander says, "Will can't fix it; there's something blocking her power on Buffy."

Giles says, "Demon magic."

And Angel, he sits at Buffy's bedside, and she's still asleep. Her skin is cold and pale, her fingers limp inside his, but she's still breathing and he hears her heartbeat.

Xander wants to know what happened, and it takes too long for Angel to collect his thoughts and understand the question. It was a snake-thing, he says, something huge and silent, except the hissing. And how does something that large move that quickly, that quietly? He asks himself these things, though he already knows that demons, true demons, are strange things, different things - subject to different rules, different physics, really.

Willow presses her palm against Buffy's forehead and says, "I can't help her," in that choked up voice Angel had almost forgotten.

Buffy's skin is cold and clammy, damp with sweat.

Xander says, "It's all right, Will. She's always all right."

Angel doesn't point out how untrue that is. He doesn't want to believe it, himself.

And Angel doesn't sleep, he doesn't need to, after all. He's at her side when the others have drifted off in their chairs or gone to bed. Dawn stays at her side, curled up in the chair Angel abandoned for her comfort, and he sits on the floor by Buffy's bedside watching the lamplight on the walls, watching the shadows. He's spent so much of his life watching shadows that sometimes he forgets how much brightness she brings in her wake. That glow he loved so much, from the moment he first saw her face and forever after. It's a rare thing, someone who can promise forever, and mean it.

So he sits beside her, and listens to her heartbeat - weak but steady, comforting in its presence - and thinks of how it's always life or death, with them.

He says, "I shouldn't have left you," even though he knows he should have. He says it because he thinks she might want to hear it, although she can't.

He says, "You have to come back, Buffy." Because he's lost too many people already. And if she comes back, if she opens her eyes, he knows he'll never walk away again. He knows just as surely as he knows that he probably should. But she's everything - all there is - her breath and her eyes, her voice and the curve of her spine and her fingertips wrapped around the Scythe, wrapped around the edges of tabletops and around his fingers too when they speak without speaking, like they've always done.

The days stretch on, and Angel loses count. Her heartbeat grows stronger, but she doesn't open her eyes. Next to her, he watches her sleep while Dawn paints Buffy's fingernails with tears in her eyes.

He tells her that Willow says the magic is fading around her; she'll survive. She'll wake up.

No one is surprised. They all knew she was strong.

He's next to her when the last act begins.

It starts with the earthquakes, in the hours before the ground splits open and the volcanoes roar. Angel holds Buffy's hand through the shaking of the castle walls, the bricks that splinter and stones that bent and break. When he finally moves away, into the monitoring rooms, the screens are flooded with news reports, screaming people, the ever-droning voice of Mr. Preacherman. For the first time, he realizes he doesn't know Mr. Preacherman's actual name.

Xander leans his weight against the computer surfaces, and Angel knows he should be out there, fighting. He should be protecting. He's a champion. He almost remembers when that meant something.

The monitors flicker to the blue haired demon woman marching through slayer defenses, her armor torn, her hands shaking. One arm draped across her shoulders, Spike is holding her up, or being held up by her.

When Illyria appears in the doorway, Angel says, "What the hell is going on out there?"

Spike says, "It's a sodding bloodbath out there."

And Illyria looks at him with her burning, dead eyes. She says, "It's the end of time.")

* * *

Buffy wakes up at 4:56am, Monday morning. The room is warm, she knows this before she understands what's happening, and she sees the light through her lids but can't open her eyes. She can't move. And all she can think is, it's like one of those horrible movies where some guy is under general anesthesia but he's still awake, or his mind is conscious inside his corpse. She tells herself that's kind of grim, but still the image lingers.

Somewhere, far away, competing voices duel for her attention, or maybe they just coexist. One tells her the end is near, and the other... if she follows it, she knows it will bring her home.

Then, fingers wrap their way around hers, and she opens her eyes.

Angel's hand is warmer against her skin, encircling hers. And they fit together so well, those hands. Despite everything.

Somewhere in the room, Mr. Preacherman's voice carries from the radio, or from the television that wasn't there the last time she was awake. He hisses out his words of fear, but Buffy isn't afraid, not anymore. Angel's fingers tickle the inside of her hand, and there are centuries between them, but she isn't afraid of that anymore, either. She feels warm, oven-warm, and soft despite the chills of venom in her blood, still burning a little, fading away.

Just for this moment she thinks it doesn't matter, maybe, if the world is ending.

Mr. Preacherman says, "Look to the skies." He says, "Now is the time to look for salvation."

And Angel says, "You're awake."

Eight.

(Angel thinks back centuries, sometimes, though the gauzy haze of remembering sometimes makes him afraid. Even so, he doesn't feel the years weighing down his bones anymore when he's with her, in the golden tint of her bedroom - their bedroom, now that he's abandoned his old, colder quarters. If they still call them quarters. Whatever they're called, he's more at home than he ever has been inside the room they share in their strange, chaste romance, separated by sheets and time.

Tonight, the windows grow darker with the silhouette of their guardian, the dragon he's known for longer than she's been alive, and still only a handful of years. The folds of time, they confound sometimes.

"I had a dream once," he says.

On his chest, Buffy's fingers twitch, flex. On his shoulder, he feels her breath, and it ruffles the stray locks of hair scattered across his skin, her face.

"What, only one?" She looks up at him, and she is in the light of the moon and the shadow of dragon's wings.

He pushes back the hair from her eyes. "Funny," he says. "Actually, I don't dream that much."

"You mean you don't remember them much."

"No," he says, "I don't dream."

Buffy's lips purse, and her eyes are hazy, too, like his mind when he thinks too far back. "I guess it's a vampire thing."

"Yeah, I guess."

She rolls aside, inches away. "Okay, so you had dreamytime. And?"

The golden light, and her face in the sun.

"I became human. For one day."

Buffy raises her eyebrows. "You only dreamt about that once? I find that suspicious at best."

"Plenty of times. But this one is especially clear." In truth, he's dreamed of it a thousand times, maybe more. But so many of them were just redos. Versions of the first where he said something differently, versions where he told her, or where he chose something else. Another path...

Buffy yawns, and stretches her legs out in, twisting into his. "So what happened in this amazing dream?"

...the road not taken.

"I gave it all back. The day. The humanity. The Powers that Be took away my breath, and no one knew but me. I would carry the burden forever, knowing what could have been." Ice cream and peanut butter, or was it chocolate? It's been so long, but he'll always remember. Kisses in the sunlight, and the sharp scent of sewage, and his own blood in his mouth - the all-too human pain of body, of soul. Of sacrifice. "You said you'd felt my heartbeat, and you'd never forget."

Her breath quickens, her skin warms. Buffy closes her eyes. "And then what?"

"You forgot."

Buffy opens one eye and looks at him. "Shrinks would have like, a field day with that kind of thing."

It breaks the moment, just like that. The tension drains from the air, and he's mostly grateful. Still, he can't quite smile. "Yeah, I guess they would."

Next to him, on top of him, Buffy moves a bit, shifts her place. "Even in your dreams you don't give yourself happy endings. Color me all... shocky."

Really, he doesn't believe in happy endings. He's not sure he believes in endings at all.)

* * *

They lose Spike only a few weeks after he's come back into the fold and for once, Buffy has no words. She feels a little ill, a little lost, and she pushes down the sudden urge to strike something. It would almost be all right, really, but when she looks to Angel for comfort, she sees nothing but the reflection of her own ache. It's hard to remember, sometimes, how the two of them had a history before she was even born. Before her mother was born. Opposites and the same, brothers and friends and enemies - it's hard to know how he feels, and impossible to guess who feels more, between them.

Then Giles says, "I'm afraid we've lost Faith as well."

Opposites and the same, sisters and friends and enemies. She feels blank, and Angel's face is ashen, grey skin and dead eyes. Buffy squeezes his hand, knowing it's a cold comfort, or no comfort, for either of them.

When they're alone together again, in the tiny space of her room that once seemed so large, Angel brings her painkillers to dull the throbbing of her body as it fights off the last of the demon snake venom. Her skin is red and enflamed around the long-closed but still scarred bite wounds, and she swallows the pills down in silence while Angel paces across the stone floor, a black shadow against the light grey walls.

She says, "It's not like I've never lost anyone before." But in her head the sentence is incomplete. She's lost too many people, and the ache never stops, it just gets worse. Sometimes she wonders if her father still thinks of her - if he ever wonders where she is, or if she died in Sunnydale. She wonders if he's relieved that she's gone, the burden of his abandonment guilt soothed in one cataclysmic collapse of road and brick, mortar and trees.

Angel stops moving, watching her instead. He's pale skin and dark hair, a system of contrasts painted gold by her yellow bedroom lights. "He was the first..." he trips on the words, just a bit, "The first boyfriend you lost."

"That's not true." She shakes her head. "I lost you. A lot of times."

"That was different. And Faith. She was your sis--"

"She was not my sister."

"She was your other half, Buffy. Dark to your light. What you could have been if you'd been--"

"A lunatic?"

"...different. Born into a different place, with different parents. I know you didn't always like her, Buffy. But I know you understood her, too. And I understand how you feel."

Mostly, she feels ill. And young. And small in a way she hasn't felt in years, despite the inexorable endgame that is the world these days, that world that's trying to reject them, or shake them off, or... something. She feels angry and lost and she wants to break the furniture, break the sky. She feels a lot of things, and she averts her eyes, because somehow his compassion is worse than coldness could ever be.

Angel says, "Buffy..."

She hides the bottom half of her face behind her knees. "You don't understand how I feel. What do you know about--" Loss. She catches herself just before the word passes her lips, and now she's angry again, but mostly at herself.

If there's anyone who knows loss better than she does, it's him.

Across the room, Angel's gaze doesn't waver, though his lips tighten, his muscles stiffen. He says, "I'm gonna try to forget you said that."

Life is a maze. An inscrutable, endless series of corridors and passageways and she can't... "I can't find the exit," she says. "Sorry. I guess I'm having a moment of stupid."

Angel sits on the edge of her bed with her, his palm resting on her knee. "What exit?"

"To the maze, I guess." Buffy closes her eyes, and the room is filled with harp music, drifting from the television - something soft and familiar. It's soothing, and she's so tired. She moves back and leans against the headboard, skin cold and tingly. "People keep going away, Angel. You, and my dad. My mom. Tara. Now Spike, Faith. Not to mention all the slayers, I can't even name them or we'll be here all night. Giles used to say the slayer was supposed to be alone, but I didn't know..."

And then Angel is at her side, next to her on the bed. His fingers lace through hers. He doesn't say she isn't alone, though she feels the words in his skin. He doesn't say that the castle, their headquarters, is filled with a small army of girls who will follow her into hell, if that's what it takes. He doesn't say that she still has her friends, that same circle she's always had. She still has him. And Buffy knows that he doesn't say it because there are no guarantees. Tomorrow, Giles could be saying they've lost Angel, too, or maybe it will be Xander saying it because maybe they'll lose Giles, as well. No guarantees.

But hopes.

Buffy says, "I wish I'd met Connor."

Angel closes his eyes. "So do I."

Mister Preacherman's voice drifts through the room. "Repent," he says, "The sinner will be sacrificed on the grave of the earth, but through the righteous comes salvation." Behind him, the harp music slows, it turns, it twists. It's like a lullaby. Or a requiem.

Buffy's eyes snap open and she lifts her head. "Angel," she says, "Who turned on the TV?"

* * *
"The first time I heard it was in Venice. I thought it was coming from someone's house."

Giles flips open a book. Seated at the head of the kitchen table, for a moment, Buffy is a teenager again, huddled with her friends in the Sunnydale High library, gathered around the desk. It's always been kind of weird, she thinks, how no one ever wondered about that until it was too late.

"I found a reference to harp music signaling the end of days," Giles says. "It's connected to Ragnarok, along with references to the snake that encircles the world--"

Xander lights up. "The midgard serpent!" Sheepishly, he adds, "Thor comics bring good things!"

Dawn wrinkles her nose. "So do mythology books. We studied that in, like, grade school."

(That, she thinks, is the main difference - Dawn, no longer a teenager, not that she's ever been one, and here instead of at the Junior High she never attended. The more normal Buffy's world seems, the more she remembers its weirdness.)

Giles turns the page. "Yes, that's all very fascinating. So, the snake which encircles the world, that's... yes, the Midgard Serpent. I suppose that must be what you encountered in Sunnydale."

Buffy rubs her leg, where she still feels the burn of its fangs. "It was pretty big, but I don't think it was world-circling big."

Willow shakes her head. "Hyperbole. Just like I don't think the music is really played by... giant herdsman making with the happy grimness. But it says the moon and sun will be eaten by wolves. I haven't seen any of that either."

"I have." Buffy pushes a pencil across the table. "In a dream right before the world went dark. Giles. Are you telling me we're dealing with Ragnarok? Seriously?"

Giles takes off his glasses, glancing down. "Well, not... exactly, Buffy. As I mentioned earlier, no one culture predicted everything. There's a reference in Norse mythologies as well as the Mayan Culture to the rebirth of the world, which certainly makes sense. The world goes through cycles. Eras, one might say - ah, there was the age of the Old Ones, and the age of mortals... it seems the world is trying to enter a new age, now."

Buffy presses her lips together. "And what does Mister Preacherman have to do with this?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. He could be an old one in human skin, such as Angel's friend Illyria. He could be a hybrid demon, a god. An opportunistic human. One never knows. It's impossible to know, unless we investigate him directly. However..." Giles takes a moment then, glancing at the book. "It's worth mentioning that if the Mayans were correct, the rebirth of the world will happen only in the pain of sinners, and the sacrifice of the righteous. And that a god would walk in human form, which seems to imply if he is anything, it is probably..."

Deep in Buffy's gut, something twists. She feels Angel's hands heavy on her shoulders. "Another god."

"Indeed." Giles closes his book. "And there is a date. December 21st, 2012." Giles looks up. "We don't have much time."

Buffy swallows, hard. "So there was that crazy who was making out with the First Evil, and now this. Clearly preachers are sucktastic and not to be trusted," she says, staring at her knees. "Okay. So we'd better get moving."

Xander says, "I hear he lives in New York."

* * *

One of the things that Buffy has come to learn over the years is that gods often have many names, many facets. In one culture, one may see a given deity (or demon, if indeed there is a difference, and she's never been entirely certain that there is) appear under a certain name and in another culture, the same entity might have another name, even another field of influence. A hell demon might become a death demon, a destruction demon, a demon of chaos, or mischief.

It's hard to tell why this happens. Giles claims it's a question of paradigms. Like the legends of the end of days, with its many names, and many symptoms, clashing symptoms. A view of reality filtered through the eyes of a specific place or culture. The reality is rarely as literal as the textbooks say.

Still, Buffy wonders who Mr. Preacherman is, and what he was called by this culture, or that. She wonders if she would recognize his names if she knew them or if, like Glory or Illyria, he would be something too old and too powerful for the mortals to know.

* * *

It doesn't take long to decide what to do. Buffy, being an advocate of the pick up a stick and stab it school of monster (or god) handling, pinpoints his Manhattan Penthouse and decides to take a group of slayers and Angel on a recon mission. They choose 6am on the first Sunday morning of December. Watching his schedule, they've determined that he goes out of during the first week of any given month. Besides, preachers are probably busy on Sunday doing their preacher thing.

Whatever that is.

Preaching, she guesses.

On Saturday night, Buffy is cold. She keeps the windows open in her bedroom, the curtains billowing inward like little parachutes whenever the air stirs, and she tucks her feet under the blankets and shivers. Against the wall lamps, Angel is a silhouette in black, his dark eyes tossing their gaze on her skin. She feels it there, the heavy weight of his concern, and the unbeating heart that's always stirred for her.

She wiggles her feet under the blankets and says, "Coming to bed?"

Angel shrugs off his coat, long and black the way it always was when they were young (or she was young). "In a minute."

She nods, rubbing her arms. "It's poley in here."

"Poley? Like... fireman poles?"

"No, like north or south. Like that. I should have Willow do a warming spell."

Angel sits on the edge of the bed and sheds his clothes, dropping them beside his feet. And tonight, it's the night before the end, she thinks, maybe. Or maybe just the night before they understand what the end is. Or maybe that's optimistic and when they get home, they won't know anything new at all.

His fingers find hers over the separation between them - the thin cotton sheets that block her body from his. He says, "I don't feel cold."

And Buffy's skin aches for something - a touch. Her ears ache for words, comfort, something else. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what she needs. But not this time. This time, the world is dying around them and they don't know how to save it. This time, they're eight hours from descending into the pit of a creature they can't define and the hours tick away in seconds, minutes. In a day they could be dead. In a week, the world itself could be gone, overrun by... something.

It's always a risk, Buffy thinks. God only knows what a new day brings. Especially now. So she tugs the sheet aside, sliding it out from beneath his legs as he moves into place, and her skin, bare and warm, brushes against his. The bed is cool and comforting in the space between them, like the cold side of a pillow on those restless nights when she tosses and turns and finds no rest. The nights when she bakes in her own body heat and her own anxiety, exhausted by her own racing mind.

Angel's lips find hers as she switches off the light, and his hands find her hips, her breasts. She remembers the first time - the only time, for them - in that apartment in Sunnydale where Angel kept his things - artifacts from another age. She was cold then, too, and scared, and he was going away. Sometimes it seems like he's always going away.

She pushes her fingers through his hair as they kiss, and pulls him nearer, and this time he won't escape. She's older now, over 30, the oldest Slayer since the beginning of slayers. But somehow, with him, a part of her is still seventeen, will always be seventeen. His eyes are bright spots in the dark room, filled with fire and longing. Really, nothing has changed.

She says, "The curse..."

Angel squeezes his eyes closed. "My son is dead," he says. "There's no such thing as absolute happiness for me now, Buffy."

Buffy's chest tightens along with her throat, and then it swells. He whispers something, asks if she's sure, and she is. She's never been more sure in her life. She's missed so much of him - even more than he's missed of her. She may never know him the way she did once, but his soul is the same - that mix and meld of the man and the demon. She knows that - the nobility of it, and the sadness. She knows his fingers too, and the way they trace lines over her skin, and the touch of his tongue against hers as she pulls the blankets up over their bodies, blocking out the cold.

The clock ticks. Another minute gone.

Continue.