Fic: Before the World Falls Down (BtVS/AtS)
Fandom: Buffy/Angel
Rating: PG-13?
Specifics: Buffy/Angel, with references to others. Approximately 27,000 words. Comics compatible up to about half-way through the second storyarc of the Buffy comic, with vague references to things that have happened since then. Totally incompatible with the Angel comic, which did not exist when this was plotted. ALAS.
Summary: There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.
I do not give warnings. But bring your tissues if you're sensitive. :P
Before the World Falls Down
Oh, this is a story about to end
And there is nothing I can do.
All the trees are missing their leaves,
Skeletons line the road.
Dancing in the bitter breeze,
I am not going home.
Prologue.
At first, Angel thinks about home.
He thinks of LA the way it was - sunlit streets he'd seen for the first time in centuries, the shadows playing across the face of the Hollywood sign at night, the alleys and pits of Hollywood Boulevard, and the sway of the trees that line the streets of Beverly Hills. Not that he spent much time there. He thinks of his first apartment in the so aptly named City of Angels - its dark corners, the elevator, the spaces where he argued with Buffy, where Faith hid, where Doyle smiled. He thinks of the hotel. Its lost souls and his broken neck. Wesley and Cordelia, Connor. Gunn. They're all gone, now.
Somewhere, or somewhen, he thinks of Sunnydale, too. At first.
After the first year (years), he remembers the flow of time, and how a flood of hours in this dimension thins as it moves, and comes through to the Earth dimension in a trickle of seconds, until every day here becomes nothing at all in the world he came from. He remembers this from the first time, whenhe spent decades (longer) tormented by -- (he still doesn't think about it, he still doesn't remember) -- tormented, before he fell naked and feral to the floor of the building where he was once damned.
When his mind cleared, he found that he'd only been gone for a few weeks, to them. (To her.)
They can't expect a cavalry. No army of slayers bursting through the long closed California Hellmouth, weapons in hand. No flash of blonde, no little quips, unless Nina counts. Nina may count. If she's even here.
That's the problem with Hell Dimensions, really. You can be gone for years, and you still can't expect help to come.
Of course, this time may be different. He's heard that each dimension has its own timescale -- differently flowing, from one to another, and maybe in this one a year is a month at home, or maybe it's six. Or maybe it's less - nanoseconds, less than a breath. Silently, he searches for escape in what free time he has -- spellbooks and scrolls, prophecies and fortune-telling.
And truth be told, he isn't sure how long it's been.
Here, there's no sun to tell time by.
One.
(There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. While he's lopping the heads off the demonic lords. While he's plotting the downfall of Wolfram and Hart - for good.
He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.
He tries not to believe that, though the words linger in the back of his mind. But he doesn't know. And even if he did, these are humans - people running through the streets below the broken windows of the Wolfram and Hart building. People born to Hell, used to Hell, yes, but deserving Hell?
No.
So Angel knows. One day, he'll find the architects of this. He'll march up to them. He'll lodge an axe right in the heart of the wolf. And then it will be over at last. LA freed, contract void. Rest for Wesley. Hell, rest for himself. One day.
But for now, it's this: teaching the new covens the right chants. Wishing there were an expert here: a Giles or, better, a Willow. Someone who knows the flow of magic directly, rather than through observation. Someone who could teach them... better than this.
Three generations of witches born and bred in the depths of hell, and they're still counting the days. Just testing the edges.
For now, it's just magic.)
* * *
LA is an empty series of buildings, a ghost town. It's funny because when people think about cities or land being pulled into Hell, they always think it would leave a physical stain, like a big crater or some kind of smoking debris. Like Sunnydale. Maybe the whole city would just vanish and leave flat ground and giant demonic symbol or something lame like that. Buffy read that one in one of Giles' dusty old books a long time ago. Well, maybe that's just her.
Then again, it could have been Willow who read that, and she just heard it. Either way.
Or it could be that's how it usually works. She wouldn't know for sure; it's not like cities regularly take vacation time and go surfing the boiling seas or anything like that.
But she does know when LA disappeared, the city didn't actually go anywhere.
* * *
"So, after this, what else is on the agenda?" Buffy pulls her gloves up to her mid-forearms and wiggles her fingers. Not exactly fashion forward, she has to admit - the half-arm glove, really not so much in style these days. But you do what you need to do, even if it does make you feel like you stepped out of a really bad episode of Project Runway. Not that she ever watches that show.
Mira flips a page in her schedule book. Buffy waits for an answer for almost half a minute before she realizes that Mira's actually talking, voice swallowed by the helicopter's propellers. Buffy points up, and Mira widens her eyes before raising her voice. "Oh, sorry! After this, there's... crop circles. In um, Wyoming? Yeah, I think it's Wyoming."
"Great, just how I want to spend my Sunday afternoon - investigating some bored farmer's field mutilating hobby. Doesn't anyone play football anymore? Maybe have some chowtime with nachos and beer? Why are crop circles even on the agenda?"
Mira stares at her, all panic-stricken and nerves. "I don't know?"
Newbies. One day they'll learn to ask questions.
Mira rubs her hands together, thick gloves on thick gloves. "The other day, I was listening to the radio, and there was this guy? He said that what happened to LA was a sign from God that the world is ending."
"Yeah, I hear that a lot." Buffy pulls a parachute onto her back and goggles over her eyes before she steps to the edge of the helicopter door. She holds The Scythe firmly between two hands. "I'll radio when I'm done," she says. "Hope I don't drop this."
She doesn't wait for an all clear before she jumps; the others will be following soon. In the meantime, she keeps her eyes open, watching the ground, the buildings grey and steelly below, coming close. The air whips at her face and the sky is big and wide and all around her.
Freefall. She'll never get used to that, either.
* * *
When it happened, people kept telling Buffy that it wasn't her fault.
Pretty annoying. She knew it wasn't her fault. She didn't tell Angel to take on the Thorn Gang or whatever they were called; she didn't tell him to piss off a cabal of demons and not even call her for backup. She definitely didn't tell him to get dragged into Who Knew Where, along with his city and all of his friends. Not to mention one of hers. If Spike qualifies as a friend. Whatever he qualifies as.
And anyway, they weren't even really talking at the time, after the whole thing with Wolfram and Hart, after the thing with that slayer. They weren't exactly buddies, bosom or otherwise. And she told them, all of them, that she knew. That it was his fault if it was anyone's, and that she couldn't save him without knowing he needed saving. She told them over and over, and they kept saying, "Buffy, don't feel bad. It's not your fault." They kept saying, "There wasn't anything you could do." And she...
...she can still remember the morning after the night when it happened - Xander over her bedside on her left, and when she opened her eyes there was Willow on her right. For a second she thought it was some kind of weird high school flashback thing, like that time when they all slept in her bedroom, because that Yaza or Maza or whatever it was demon got all stalky at their houses.
Then Willow said, "Buffy," and Xander looked away, and just like that, she knew it was Angel.
It took them a year and what seemed like a million tests to figure out where the city had gone. Buffy felt sick when she heard it. She wanted to bloody her fist against the bathroom tile, but she couldn't let it in. She had to be the role model, instead, she had to be the leader. She had to be a grown up instead of a self-flagellating S&M freak, and anyway she was pretty sure she grew out of that phase years ago.
So she nodded, and when the demons started appearing, she sent a squadron of slayers to man the borders, and she went on patrol with Satsu that night.
(And so she understands Spike a little more now, because she saved Angel every night for a year, in her mind. In her dreams, she touched the concrete of LA's ground and whispered his name, and the earth opened up and he was there again, with her name on his lips the way he was when she was seventeen and he found her again.)
Willow said, "There wasn't anything you could do, Buffy."
And she said, "I know, Will."
(How could they know she blamed herself?)
* * *
Buffy lands between buildings near the edge of the city, parachute pooling in a white canvas ocean behind her, the Scythe still cradled between her two hands. She shrugs the straps off of her shoulders as Donna and Bailey come to rest in the area, too, Donna stumbling two steps before she finds her footing. Already the air is weird; different. Charged. The pieces of Willow's magic that live inside her, they're all tingling and there are colors lingering in the air in her peripheral vision, dissipating into nothing when she tries to catch them head on. Buffy's body hums inside.
LA hasn't changed since the last time she came, really - a bit more graffiti from the "tourists," people who wander through just to see the old, dead city in its faded glory, and posters blanketing the walls, preaching damnation. Preaching the end.
Bailey's heels click on the pavement as she approaches Buffy. "Marla is coming," she says. "She's got news, I think." She glances at the defaced walls and shakes her head; Buffy looks, too - Aaron fucked Margaret, it seems, and the posters say God is coming for you. They say, The Cycle Begins Anew and Watch God Loves, Sundays 7am, ABC. Spread across the face of it, a beautiful blond man smiles with his too many teeth, too big a grin.
Bailey snickers. "Shit. People, have a little respect for the departed! Even if it is a city. What a thing to profit from." Fingers spread wide against the surface of the poster, she says, "And look at this jerk. I call him Mr. Preacherman. Don't you think he looks like a Mr. Preacherman?"
Buffy barely hears her; the city is humming too, in tune with the magic in her blood. She crouches down, one knee to the dirty pavement, palm pressed against the ground. It's warm - flesh-warm. Burning just beneath the surface warm. Inside her skin, Willow's magic calls to the fire inside the cement, or the earth beneath. It can be hard to tell the difference. Buffy taps the pavement and lets the magic go. It tears through the ground, through and around buildings, a trail of energy pulsing in its wake, marking the true borders of LA. The borders beyond the metal and steel and into its missing soul.
Buffy never thought of cities as alive, until post-Angel LA.
She steps back, Bailey and Donna on either side of her; in the distance she hears footsteps (Marla? Satsu? And someone else.) and in front of them, a wall of magic marks the gateway between dimensions.
The footsteps slow, and stop. By her ear, Marla says, "Oh my God, what is that?"
Buffy doesn't look back. "It's the breaking point between LA and the two worlds it's in." Wavering near her body, its heat warms her skin as the magical wall bulges and fractures, heals and breaks.
Donna says, "It looks like something's trying to get out."
"I think it is," Buffy says. "The City of Angels." She holds up her hand, and the light of the gateway throws patterns on her palm - orange, blue and grey. "What happened to you?"
* * *
The first time they went there, after it happened, Willow said it was empty.
Buffy looked up and down the deserted streets, barren as a Midwestern ghost town in one of those stupid movies with the gunslinger spirits. She half expected tumbleweeds but it was LA so she got yesterday's newspapers instead.
"Yeah," she said, "I can kind of see that," but she knew that wasn't really what Willow meant. Because LA wasn't just empty of people, it was empty - the buildings, pristine, untouched as they were, they were fossils, and while the city looked like LA on the outside, the LA-ness of it had gone.
Buffy didn't know how to describe it, so she didn't try. But every time she thought about it, it made her shake inside.
LA died, and it left its bones behind. But it didn't take its ghosts.
(In the corner, on the street, she sees Angel's specter, the remembrance of him, and she hopes he's standing there, right there on the corner beneath the streetlamp with the mist at his feet and the moon at his back. And she knows that time moves differently in Hell than it does on the surface, and God, two years, LA has been gone for two years. She can't imagine how long it's been for them.
He could be gone forever. He could be dead, in a more than partial way.
He could be, but she doesn't believe it. Somehow she always thought, she always knew, she'd feel it if he disappeared.)
* * *
When Los Angeles comes home, the world bleeds red across the sky and crimson raindrops scorch the ground. The sun is red, too, the bloodied face of Apollo dripping fire into the clouds, and sometimes, the rain brings fire when it falls. The streets are filled with running people, and the gutters, the streets, the buildings are splashed with the blood of humans, the blood of the demons, the blood of the land.
Oh yeah, the demons.
There are fewer than Buffy would have thought (she notices this while she splits one in two, Scythe flashing in the shadows and the dark); there aren't as many as there could be. There are a few larger ones, and a few slithering lower beings and Buffy's never seen anything like... some of them. The claws and fangs, all right, but the skin, the way they trail flames behind them, the gleam of their oily flesh and the way their hands scrape the concrete and leave grooves and broken street where they step. The snakes and winged things, like pictures from a nightmare; like the mayor again. The slayers, her army, they start to move before she signals to them. The ones who can move, who aren't stricken motionless with fear.
She knows Angel is there before she sees him, but that doesn't dull the flood of relief of the sight of him. He doesn't look much the worse for wear, but it's not like he was losing out on a lot of premium suntanning time. And he's alive, in a dead kind of way. And Buffy's a little guarded, it's true, she's a little worried because it's not like they kissed the last time they spoke (or, okay, they did, but she means after that, the meeting that wasn't meeting). But there's no time for fretting because there's some kind of big purple thing with talons hovering over him and he's alive enough to kill it, and that's enough for her.
Angel says, "Buffy, behind you," and it's the first time she's heard his voice in years. She spins around, and cleaves a big red-black thing in half. Warnings, they're the best kind of hello.
"You have to tell me how you brought it back," she says.
"We'll talk. Soon as we clean this up." Angel grabs an arm length shard of glass and shoves it through the chest of a rather nasty, mucous covered fish-thing; somewhere, far away, she sees the massive beating of... dragon wings? Angel says, "That could take a while."
Buffy ducks a scaly fist. "I bet I can speed it up," she says and presses a finger to her headset.
Static, and then Xander says, "Buff! Buffster! What's going on down there?"
Buffy breaks the scale-faced demon's arm over her knee. "A mess," she says, "Get Willow in here."
* * *
They meet in the burnt out remains of an old Starbucks. It's day two, and the demons are gone - fled back to the shadows, to the alleys and to Hell. The city is quiet now, except for the crying, and the footsteps. LA, infested with monsters that skulk in the shadows and flee from the light. Sort of like everywhere else. It'll never be the same again.
Buffy sweeps glass shards from the seat at one of those little tables that are never open in any city but this one. She sweeps dust from the surface, too. Angel stands by the counter, and the slight breeze from the broken in windows stirs his frayed and torn up coat. He doesn't look older, of course he doesn't. But he looks tired. He looks worn. She pats the table across from her, and Angel shakes his head.
"Not in much of a sitting mood," he says.
"Okay. Feel free to stand there and be Mr. Grumpypants." Buffy shrugs and watches the white dust on her palm. She tries not to think of what it might be. Scattered vampire flesh and bone and brain and sinew and magic mixed with decomposition mixed with age. In some world, some time, it could have been him.
He asks what he's missed, and she tells him about a few elections, a few world ending crises.
He says, "I meant, what did I miss with you."
She stops, kicks the ground. "My life has been pretty cue the etcetera music. I mean, aside from the whole collapsed hometown and the international slayer operation. Overall, nothing you'd want to see."
Angel says, "I didn't think we'd ever get back."
"How long were you there?" Buffy wipes the dust onto her pants. "I mean, in Hell Dimension time."
Moonlight filters through the broken glass, the shattered marks of the windows. The shadows of cracks lay crystalline patterns across Angel's face. "Don't know," he says. "I lost track after a while."
She has so many questions, endless whys and hows and whats. Things the Watcher's Council, such as it is, would want to know, to fill out the emptied body of its knowledge, everything lost when the First Evil destroyed the original council, and its headquarters.
But she doesn't ask. And when she gets back to Scotland and tells Xander, tells Giles, that she has no answers and no idea, they'll give her that look like they did when she was just a child. And they'll think she's lost her mind again, lost her mind over that billowing coat and that dark-eyed pain, the way she did at sixteen and seventeen, eighteen. The way she never stopped doing, not really. And Xander will say Angel's messed things up again, and Willow will say they should try to be understanding, and Buffy will let them argue it out and blame her, or absolve her.
She won't tell them why she didn't ask. She won't tell them that the ghosts in Angel's eyes told her more than anything he could have said or done. She won't tell them that she couldn't bring herself to make him relive whatever it is he's just escaped, or dig up the bones of everything he's lost.
He leaves with Spike and a slender, blue haired woman before the sun comes up. Spike looks at her with old eyes, too, and he waves goodbye without speaking. For a moment, she looks for something there - a spark of that old obsession, or even just a little... life. But he looks away before she finds it, if there's anything to find.
It's funny how things can change.
Spike, Angel and the blue demon-woman. Illyria, she thinks, or at least that's what she heard.
It takes a few minutes for her to realize that they are all that's left of Angel's friends, Angel's world.
Continue.
Rating: PG-13?
Specifics: Buffy/Angel, with references to others. Approximately 27,000 words. Comics compatible up to about half-way through the second storyarc of the Buffy comic, with vague references to things that have happened since then. Totally incompatible with the Angel comic, which did not exist when this was plotted. ALAS.
Summary: There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.
I do not give warnings. But bring your tissues if you're sensitive. :P
Before the World Falls Down
Oh, this is a story about to end
And there is nothing I can do.
All the trees are missing their leaves,
Skeletons line the road.
Dancing in the bitter breeze,
I am not going home.
Prologue.
At first, Angel thinks about home.
He thinks of LA the way it was - sunlit streets he'd seen for the first time in centuries, the shadows playing across the face of the Hollywood sign at night, the alleys and pits of Hollywood Boulevard, and the sway of the trees that line the streets of Beverly Hills. Not that he spent much time there. He thinks of his first apartment in the so aptly named City of Angels - its dark corners, the elevator, the spaces where he argued with Buffy, where Faith hid, where Doyle smiled. He thinks of the hotel. Its lost souls and his broken neck. Wesley and Cordelia, Connor. Gunn. They're all gone, now.
Somewhere, or somewhen, he thinks of Sunnydale, too. At first.
After the first year (years), he remembers the flow of time, and how a flood of hours in this dimension thins as it moves, and comes through to the Earth dimension in a trickle of seconds, until every day here becomes nothing at all in the world he came from. He remembers this from the first time, whenhe spent decades (longer) tormented by -- (he still doesn't think about it, he still doesn't remember) -- tormented, before he fell naked and feral to the floor of the building where he was once damned.
When his mind cleared, he found that he'd only been gone for a few weeks, to them. (To her.)
They can't expect a cavalry. No army of slayers bursting through the long closed California Hellmouth, weapons in hand. No flash of blonde, no little quips, unless Nina counts. Nina may count. If she's even here.
That's the problem with Hell Dimensions, really. You can be gone for years, and you still can't expect help to come.
Of course, this time may be different. He's heard that each dimension has its own timescale -- differently flowing, from one to another, and maybe in this one a year is a month at home, or maybe it's six. Or maybe it's less - nanoseconds, less than a breath. Silently, he searches for escape in what free time he has -- spellbooks and scrolls, prophecies and fortune-telling.
And truth be told, he isn't sure how long it's been.
Here, there's no sun to tell time by.
One.
(There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. While he's lopping the heads off the demonic lords. While he's plotting the downfall of Wolfram and Hart - for good.
He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.
He tries not to believe that, though the words linger in the back of his mind. But he doesn't know. And even if he did, these are humans - people running through the streets below the broken windows of the Wolfram and Hart building. People born to Hell, used to Hell, yes, but deserving Hell?
No.
So Angel knows. One day, he'll find the architects of this. He'll march up to them. He'll lodge an axe right in the heart of the wolf. And then it will be over at last. LA freed, contract void. Rest for Wesley. Hell, rest for himself. One day.
But for now, it's this: teaching the new covens the right chants. Wishing there were an expert here: a Giles or, better, a Willow. Someone who knows the flow of magic directly, rather than through observation. Someone who could teach them... better than this.
Three generations of witches born and bred in the depths of hell, and they're still counting the days. Just testing the edges.
For now, it's just magic.)
* * *
LA is an empty series of buildings, a ghost town. It's funny because when people think about cities or land being pulled into Hell, they always think it would leave a physical stain, like a big crater or some kind of smoking debris. Like Sunnydale. Maybe the whole city would just vanish and leave flat ground and giant demonic symbol or something lame like that. Buffy read that one in one of Giles' dusty old books a long time ago. Well, maybe that's just her.
Then again, it could have been Willow who read that, and she just heard it. Either way.
Or it could be that's how it usually works. She wouldn't know for sure; it's not like cities regularly take vacation time and go surfing the boiling seas or anything like that.
But she does know when LA disappeared, the city didn't actually go anywhere.
* * *
"So, after this, what else is on the agenda?" Buffy pulls her gloves up to her mid-forearms and wiggles her fingers. Not exactly fashion forward, she has to admit - the half-arm glove, really not so much in style these days. But you do what you need to do, even if it does make you feel like you stepped out of a really bad episode of Project Runway. Not that she ever watches that show.
Mira flips a page in her schedule book. Buffy waits for an answer for almost half a minute before she realizes that Mira's actually talking, voice swallowed by the helicopter's propellers. Buffy points up, and Mira widens her eyes before raising her voice. "Oh, sorry! After this, there's... crop circles. In um, Wyoming? Yeah, I think it's Wyoming."
"Great, just how I want to spend my Sunday afternoon - investigating some bored farmer's field mutilating hobby. Doesn't anyone play football anymore? Maybe have some chowtime with nachos and beer? Why are crop circles even on the agenda?"
Mira stares at her, all panic-stricken and nerves. "I don't know?"
Newbies. One day they'll learn to ask questions.
Mira rubs her hands together, thick gloves on thick gloves. "The other day, I was listening to the radio, and there was this guy? He said that what happened to LA was a sign from God that the world is ending."
"Yeah, I hear that a lot." Buffy pulls a parachute onto her back and goggles over her eyes before she steps to the edge of the helicopter door. She holds The Scythe firmly between two hands. "I'll radio when I'm done," she says. "Hope I don't drop this."
She doesn't wait for an all clear before she jumps; the others will be following soon. In the meantime, she keeps her eyes open, watching the ground, the buildings grey and steelly below, coming close. The air whips at her face and the sky is big and wide and all around her.
Freefall. She'll never get used to that, either.
* * *
When it happened, people kept telling Buffy that it wasn't her fault.
Pretty annoying. She knew it wasn't her fault. She didn't tell Angel to take on the Thorn Gang or whatever they were called; she didn't tell him to piss off a cabal of demons and not even call her for backup. She definitely didn't tell him to get dragged into Who Knew Where, along with his city and all of his friends. Not to mention one of hers. If Spike qualifies as a friend. Whatever he qualifies as.
And anyway, they weren't even really talking at the time, after the whole thing with Wolfram and Hart, after the thing with that slayer. They weren't exactly buddies, bosom or otherwise. And she told them, all of them, that she knew. That it was his fault if it was anyone's, and that she couldn't save him without knowing he needed saving. She told them over and over, and they kept saying, "Buffy, don't feel bad. It's not your fault." They kept saying, "There wasn't anything you could do." And she...
...she can still remember the morning after the night when it happened - Xander over her bedside on her left, and when she opened her eyes there was Willow on her right. For a second she thought it was some kind of weird high school flashback thing, like that time when they all slept in her bedroom, because that Yaza or Maza or whatever it was demon got all stalky at their houses.
Then Willow said, "Buffy," and Xander looked away, and just like that, she knew it was Angel.
It took them a year and what seemed like a million tests to figure out where the city had gone. Buffy felt sick when she heard it. She wanted to bloody her fist against the bathroom tile, but she couldn't let it in. She had to be the role model, instead, she had to be the leader. She had to be a grown up instead of a self-flagellating S&M freak, and anyway she was pretty sure she grew out of that phase years ago.
So she nodded, and when the demons started appearing, she sent a squadron of slayers to man the borders, and she went on patrol with Satsu that night.
(And so she understands Spike a little more now, because she saved Angel every night for a year, in her mind. In her dreams, she touched the concrete of LA's ground and whispered his name, and the earth opened up and he was there again, with her name on his lips the way he was when she was seventeen and he found her again.)
Willow said, "There wasn't anything you could do, Buffy."
And she said, "I know, Will."
(How could they know she blamed herself?)
* * *
Buffy lands between buildings near the edge of the city, parachute pooling in a white canvas ocean behind her, the Scythe still cradled between her two hands. She shrugs the straps off of her shoulders as Donna and Bailey come to rest in the area, too, Donna stumbling two steps before she finds her footing. Already the air is weird; different. Charged. The pieces of Willow's magic that live inside her, they're all tingling and there are colors lingering in the air in her peripheral vision, dissipating into nothing when she tries to catch them head on. Buffy's body hums inside.
LA hasn't changed since the last time she came, really - a bit more graffiti from the "tourists," people who wander through just to see the old, dead city in its faded glory, and posters blanketing the walls, preaching damnation. Preaching the end.
Bailey's heels click on the pavement as she approaches Buffy. "Marla is coming," she says. "She's got news, I think." She glances at the defaced walls and shakes her head; Buffy looks, too - Aaron fucked Margaret, it seems, and the posters say God is coming for you. They say, The Cycle Begins Anew and Watch God Loves, Sundays 7am, ABC. Spread across the face of it, a beautiful blond man smiles with his too many teeth, too big a grin.
Bailey snickers. "Shit. People, have a little respect for the departed! Even if it is a city. What a thing to profit from." Fingers spread wide against the surface of the poster, she says, "And look at this jerk. I call him Mr. Preacherman. Don't you think he looks like a Mr. Preacherman?"
Buffy barely hears her; the city is humming too, in tune with the magic in her blood. She crouches down, one knee to the dirty pavement, palm pressed against the ground. It's warm - flesh-warm. Burning just beneath the surface warm. Inside her skin, Willow's magic calls to the fire inside the cement, or the earth beneath. It can be hard to tell the difference. Buffy taps the pavement and lets the magic go. It tears through the ground, through and around buildings, a trail of energy pulsing in its wake, marking the true borders of LA. The borders beyond the metal and steel and into its missing soul.
Buffy never thought of cities as alive, until post-Angel LA.
She steps back, Bailey and Donna on either side of her; in the distance she hears footsteps (Marla? Satsu? And someone else.) and in front of them, a wall of magic marks the gateway between dimensions.
The footsteps slow, and stop. By her ear, Marla says, "Oh my God, what is that?"
Buffy doesn't look back. "It's the breaking point between LA and the two worlds it's in." Wavering near her body, its heat warms her skin as the magical wall bulges and fractures, heals and breaks.
Donna says, "It looks like something's trying to get out."
"I think it is," Buffy says. "The City of Angels." She holds up her hand, and the light of the gateway throws patterns on her palm - orange, blue and grey. "What happened to you?"
* * *
The first time they went there, after it happened, Willow said it was empty.
Buffy looked up and down the deserted streets, barren as a Midwestern ghost town in one of those stupid movies with the gunslinger spirits. She half expected tumbleweeds but it was LA so she got yesterday's newspapers instead.
"Yeah," she said, "I can kind of see that," but she knew that wasn't really what Willow meant. Because LA wasn't just empty of people, it was empty - the buildings, pristine, untouched as they were, they were fossils, and while the city looked like LA on the outside, the LA-ness of it had gone.
Buffy didn't know how to describe it, so she didn't try. But every time she thought about it, it made her shake inside.
LA died, and it left its bones behind. But it didn't take its ghosts.
(In the corner, on the street, she sees Angel's specter, the remembrance of him, and she hopes he's standing there, right there on the corner beneath the streetlamp with the mist at his feet and the moon at his back. And she knows that time moves differently in Hell than it does on the surface, and God, two years, LA has been gone for two years. She can't imagine how long it's been for them.
He could be gone forever. He could be dead, in a more than partial way.
He could be, but she doesn't believe it. Somehow she always thought, she always knew, she'd feel it if he disappeared.)
* * *
When Los Angeles comes home, the world bleeds red across the sky and crimson raindrops scorch the ground. The sun is red, too, the bloodied face of Apollo dripping fire into the clouds, and sometimes, the rain brings fire when it falls. The streets are filled with running people, and the gutters, the streets, the buildings are splashed with the blood of humans, the blood of the demons, the blood of the land.
Oh yeah, the demons.
There are fewer than Buffy would have thought (she notices this while she splits one in two, Scythe flashing in the shadows and the dark); there aren't as many as there could be. There are a few larger ones, and a few slithering lower beings and Buffy's never seen anything like... some of them. The claws and fangs, all right, but the skin, the way they trail flames behind them, the gleam of their oily flesh and the way their hands scrape the concrete and leave grooves and broken street where they step. The snakes and winged things, like pictures from a nightmare; like the mayor again. The slayers, her army, they start to move before she signals to them. The ones who can move, who aren't stricken motionless with fear.
She knows Angel is there before she sees him, but that doesn't dull the flood of relief of the sight of him. He doesn't look much the worse for wear, but it's not like he was losing out on a lot of premium suntanning time. And he's alive, in a dead kind of way. And Buffy's a little guarded, it's true, she's a little worried because it's not like they kissed the last time they spoke (or, okay, they did, but she means after that, the meeting that wasn't meeting). But there's no time for fretting because there's some kind of big purple thing with talons hovering over him and he's alive enough to kill it, and that's enough for her.
Angel says, "Buffy, behind you," and it's the first time she's heard his voice in years. She spins around, and cleaves a big red-black thing in half. Warnings, they're the best kind of hello.
"You have to tell me how you brought it back," she says.
"We'll talk. Soon as we clean this up." Angel grabs an arm length shard of glass and shoves it through the chest of a rather nasty, mucous covered fish-thing; somewhere, far away, she sees the massive beating of... dragon wings? Angel says, "That could take a while."
Buffy ducks a scaly fist. "I bet I can speed it up," she says and presses a finger to her headset.
Static, and then Xander says, "Buff! Buffster! What's going on down there?"
Buffy breaks the scale-faced demon's arm over her knee. "A mess," she says, "Get Willow in here."
* * *
They meet in the burnt out remains of an old Starbucks. It's day two, and the demons are gone - fled back to the shadows, to the alleys and to Hell. The city is quiet now, except for the crying, and the footsteps. LA, infested with monsters that skulk in the shadows and flee from the light. Sort of like everywhere else. It'll never be the same again.
Buffy sweeps glass shards from the seat at one of those little tables that are never open in any city but this one. She sweeps dust from the surface, too. Angel stands by the counter, and the slight breeze from the broken in windows stirs his frayed and torn up coat. He doesn't look older, of course he doesn't. But he looks tired. He looks worn. She pats the table across from her, and Angel shakes his head.
"Not in much of a sitting mood," he says.
"Okay. Feel free to stand there and be Mr. Grumpypants." Buffy shrugs and watches the white dust on her palm. She tries not to think of what it might be. Scattered vampire flesh and bone and brain and sinew and magic mixed with decomposition mixed with age. In some world, some time, it could have been him.
He asks what he's missed, and she tells him about a few elections, a few world ending crises.
He says, "I meant, what did I miss with you."
She stops, kicks the ground. "My life has been pretty cue the etcetera music. I mean, aside from the whole collapsed hometown and the international slayer operation. Overall, nothing you'd want to see."
Angel says, "I didn't think we'd ever get back."
"How long were you there?" Buffy wipes the dust onto her pants. "I mean, in Hell Dimension time."
Moonlight filters through the broken glass, the shattered marks of the windows. The shadows of cracks lay crystalline patterns across Angel's face. "Don't know," he says. "I lost track after a while."
She has so many questions, endless whys and hows and whats. Things the Watcher's Council, such as it is, would want to know, to fill out the emptied body of its knowledge, everything lost when the First Evil destroyed the original council, and its headquarters.
But she doesn't ask. And when she gets back to Scotland and tells Xander, tells Giles, that she has no answers and no idea, they'll give her that look like they did when she was just a child. And they'll think she's lost her mind again, lost her mind over that billowing coat and that dark-eyed pain, the way she did at sixteen and seventeen, eighteen. The way she never stopped doing, not really. And Xander will say Angel's messed things up again, and Willow will say they should try to be understanding, and Buffy will let them argue it out and blame her, or absolve her.
She won't tell them why she didn't ask. She won't tell them that the ghosts in Angel's eyes told her more than anything he could have said or done. She won't tell them that she couldn't bring herself to make him relive whatever it is he's just escaped, or dig up the bones of everything he's lost.
He leaves with Spike and a slender, blue haired woman before the sun comes up. Spike looks at her with old eyes, too, and he waves goodbye without speaking. For a moment, she looks for something there - a spark of that old obsession, or even just a little... life. But he looks away before she finds it, if there's anything to find.
It's funny how things can change.
Spike, Angel and the blue demon-woman. Illyria, she thinks, or at least that's what she heard.
It takes a few minutes for her to realize that they are all that's left of Angel's friends, Angel's world.
Continue.