Coincidence (2/2)
Fic Title: Coincidence (2/2)
Author: total_fangirl
Rating: R for language and sexuality
Word Count: 9126
Spoilers: Anything from any season is fair game
Summary: 5 years after “Not Fade Away,” Buffy is living in Pennsylvania when she discovers that Angel didn’t die in LA after all.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Serenity, PA is completely made up, and the only characters that are mine are Jon and Liam
Notes: I tried to stay as close to the request as possible, and, while this is B/A, there is some B/OC (though nothing explicit). Flashbacks are in italics. Written for the cya_ficathon and much love to bklyangel for all of her feedback!
The Request: 5 years after the Angel finale, and B/A haven't spoken since "Chosen". How does their reunion go? Can be set anywhere the author is comfortable with, include any other characters, any rating - I don't really want a super fluffy or super angsty ending - somewhere in between. Things to include: a dinner out, an old photograph (or drawing, I guess, since this is Angel...), no Shanshu.
It was like falling back in time as she stared at the vampire that she had thought that she had lost. Suddenly, she was sixteen all over again and seeing him across the Bronze, her heart beating so wildly that it felt as if it would explode out of her chest, every nerve singing because he was here, he was really here.
Five years. For five years, she had dreamt of this moment, of the day that Angel would come back to her, and she had imagined her reaction differently every time. No matter what trite dialogue her mind inserted in the fantasy, it always ended the same way: with her throwing her arms around him and kissing him until she couldn’t breathe. After they were done, he would tell her how he wanted her to be his forever, screw what was right or proper, and then they would live happily ever after. That was the fantasy.
But this was the reality, and the last thing that Buffy wanted was to kiss the man before her, the one that was staring at her as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he was happy to see her.
Robin jerked his hand out of her grasp and demanded, “What’s going on? Who are you?”
The gasp behind Buffy prompted her to turn, seeing the wide range of emotions playing over Dawn’s face. Even if the younger girl had been closer to Spike than Angel, Angel had always had an almost mythic quality to him that Dawn had been fascinated with when she was a child; she had always seen Angel as perfect. That is, until he left Sunnydale. After that, Dawn had never uttered a positive syllable about the souled vampire. However, when she had heard the news of his demise, she had cried along with her sister. A walking contradiction: that was Dawnie.
“Angel,” Dawn breathed, slowly moving forward, despite Buffy grabbing at her arm. “Is that you?”
Despite the fact that he was being held by several angry Slayers, despite the fact that Faith’s husband wanted nothing more than to stake him right now, despite the fact that the love of his life was staring at him as if she didn’t even know who he was, he couldn’t help but smile at the sight of little Dawn all grown-up. “It’s me.”
Dawn’s blue eyes locked with Buffy’s green ones, indefinite emotions flying between them. Finally, she ventured, “Buffy?”
“Let him go,” the blonde Slayer ordered the others.
“Are you kidding?” Kennedy snapped. “This guy tried to kill Faith.”
“You don’t know that. We can’t do anything rash.”
Pure condescension on her face, Kennedy drawled, “What a surprise. Buffy would rather protect her boyfriend than do what’s best for us.”
“Shut up!” Dawn ordered. “You don’t understand anything!”
“What, like this is any different from what she did with Spike? Apparently, if you fuck her, that means you can kill whoever you want!”
It happened so fast that even Buffy didn’t have time to register what was going on. Suddenly, Kennedy was being suspended half of a foot off the ground by Angel’s hand around her neck, the other Slayers, new to the game, so shocked that they backed up.
“Apologize,” he growled, his fingertips pressing painfully into her flesh.
Buffy quickly made her way over to him, kicking him hard behind the knee, bringing him down and sending Kennedy sprawling back onto Robin and Faith’s manicured lawn. As she crab walked as fast as she could to get out of reach of the vampire, Angel stared up at Buffy from his position on his knees. When he said, “Buffy,” his eyes full of pain, the memory of him on his knees after killing Pete, his arms wrapped around her waist, back in her life after the first time she had thought she had permanently lost him was just too much.
“Take your friend and get out,” Buffy ordered, clearly trying to keep the tears out of her voice. “You aren’t welcome here.”
Slowly climbing to his feet, he blurted out, “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t owe you any explanations. You’re nothing to me.”
For the first time in her life, Buffy walked away from Angel, leaving him to stare after her, anguish tearing through him.
* * *
“Buffy-“
“I don’t want to talk about it, Dawn.”
“But Angel’s alive. And you sent him away. Either one of those things is good for a lifetime of conversation.”
Buffy finally looked up from the photo album that Xander and Willow had given her for Christmas the past year. It had taken them awhile to gather up enough pictures for the album; they had asked everyone they knew for copies of photos from Sunnydale that, when combined with those that they had managed to salvage before the great escape, gave Buffy the only actual proof that Sunnydale had been real.
“Dawnie, I made my peace with Angel a long time ago. I’m with Jon and I’m happy. I don’t need…I don’t need him anymore.”
No malice in her tone, she scoffed, “Liar.”
“Dawn-“
“Don’t shut me out here, Buffy! You hafta be freaking out, so let’s talk about it.”
“Go to bed, Dawnie.”
Crossing her arms across her chest, she said, “I’m not a little kid anymore. You can’t send me to my room.”
Buffy’s tone was slightly pleading as she repeated herself. Dawn stared at her big sister, at how tired she appeared, and she sagged with defeat, obediently heading towards her room, closing Buffy’s door behind her. She was familiar with Buffy’s emotional lockdown; she wasn’t going to be sharing anything until she was good and ready, no matter how hard Dawn tried.
Of course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t use someone else as her confessional, which was exactly why Dawn immediately got on the phone to England. When in doubt, call the best friend.
* * *
Angel had always hated getting his picture taken. She must’ve tried dozens of times during their relationship to get him to hold still long enough to get a photo, but Angel always seemed to hate looking at himself. Buffy had chalked it up to the soul, to self-hatred, but that didn’t stop her from wanting a picture of him. When Connor had called her five years ago to tell her that Angel had passed away, part of what made the grief so despairing was that there was no proof that he had even existed. For awhile, Buffy had wondered if maybe he had just been some fantasy, a hallucination that she had created to make her teenage years slightly less painful.
And then there he was, and suddenly she remembered just how real Angel was and always had been.
How could she have ever doubted that he had been real when no other person had ever been able to turn her inside out so completely?
With a groan, she closed the photo album and crossed to her closet. Setting the album on the shelf, she grabbed her battered pair of sneakers and slid them on, lacing them tightly. She needed to clear her mind, and, as she had found out in Italy, running was the quickest way to do so. More than once Giles had hinted that he thought she was trying to outrun her problems by pushing her body to the breaking point, some days running a marathon’s length to “de-stress”, but Buffy didn’t want her Watcher’s psychoanalysis. If she could manage to deal with her pain without ever committing a felony, unlike Faith, then she figured she earned the right to be left alone.
The night was still as her feet pounded against the pavement of her neighborhood, the cold air no relief for her overheated skin as she progressed from a jog to a full-on sprint.
She needed to forget what it was like to see Angel standing there, so amazingly alive, flesh and blood when she had thought he was nothing but dust long ago.
She needed to forget what it was like to realize that the man she had loved for the past twelve years hadn’t ever bothered to contact her to let her know that he had, in fact, survived the horrors of his last stand.
She needed to forget what it was like to be pulled apart by every conflicting emotion in her body the moment she laid eyes on the one person she had ever fully given her heart to.
She needed to just forget.
As she returned to her house, slowed her pace, her muscles burning from exertion, sweat rolling down her face, she began to cough as oxygen wasn’t filling her lungs as quickly as she needed it. When the coughs turned to sobs, Buffy slid to her knees on her front lawn, too exhausted to even move towards the front door.
After everything that had happened, Buffy Summers was right back where she had started.
* * *
Angel had been silent the entire drive back to Philadelphia, his hands conspicuously tight as he clutched the steering wheel. Gunn watched his best friend carefully, trying to gauge how exactly to approach the situation at hand, before he realized that he was incredibly out of his depth here. Until tonight, Gunn had never met the famous Buffy Summers; all of his knowledge about the Slayer was secondhand accounts from Cordy and Wes. Whenever the Buffy topic had been broached in the past, it had been them who had handled the surly vampire. Without them, Gunn had no idea what the appropriate sentiment was for, “So you wanna talk about how the love of your life just destroyed you emotionally?”
However, Gunn still needed to try because God knew that Angel had been there for him.
When Gunn had woken up at Sedars-Cinai Hospital, he had been attached to every machine known to man and he could not feel the entire left side of his body. A breathing tube was down his throat, and Gunn had been grasping for a call button when he had felt a cold hand against his skin. Unable to move his neck, which was held in place by a halo for a spinal injury, he had shifted his eyes to see Angel sitting beside his bed, his face mottled with bruises of varying shades, an ugly gash covering his forehead, his clothes dirty and covered in holes.
He had tried to speak despite the impossibility it posed, and Angel had said, “You’re gonna be fine. Don’t try to struggle.”
“Yes, that could hurt you more,” Illyria’s monotone informed him. The demon’s voice wasn’t her own though; it was heavy with a Texas accent that Gunn knew all too well. When his eyes found her, his suspicion was confirmed; Illyria was taking Fred’s form so that she wouldn’t startle the medical staff.
Gunn gurgled in his throat, his right hand reaching for the breathing tube, but Angel stilled him, telling him that he’d get the nurse. Once the tube was removed, Gunn swallowed heavily, trying to get the pain to subsist. Finally, he tried to speak, his words so slurred that it was almost incomprehensible.
“Where’s Spike?”
Angel’s face clouded with sadness as he just shook his head.
Gunn had a broken back, a punctured lung, severe blood loss, and had suffered a stroke. The left side of his body was paralyzed, though through physical therapy he would probably he able to walk again with some assistance. Speech therapy would be needed so that he could learn to speak clearly again, and his left hand was now basically useless. There would be no more demon fighting for Charles Gunn, the street kid that had fought to protect everyone he knew.
When the insurance money for the Hyperion, the Wolfram & Hart offices, and every vehicle came in, Angel had used the millions to start their new life. He had known that they would probably never be free of the Senior Partners, but he refused to live in fear. When he had contacted Connor to tell him he was alive, Connor had been attacked the next day by the Order of Taraka; once disposed of, Angel knew that he couldn’t contact anyone who had meant anything to him.
Philadelphia had the best rehabilitation center in the country for stroke victims, and Angel had moved them there, Illyria coming along out of the intense protective feelings she now harbored for them. For three years, no questions asked, Angel handed over money to therapists so that Gunn could return to some semblance of the man he had been. When the speech therapists recommended exercises, Angel patiently sat and went over consonant sounds with him; when the physical therapists recommended that Gunn get equipment in his home to work out with, Angel bought type of the line everything to fill a room in the house he had bought. Gunn knew that Angel’s helpfulness was almost certainly because Gunn was the very last of the Angel Investigations team, but he would never be able to fully express his gratitude to the vampire.
The lights in the massive Victorian were all on, and Illyria appeared almost instantly as they crossed the threshold. She looked them up and down before declaring, “I’m glad that the girls did not kill you.”
Gunn couldn’t help but chuckle. “Thanks.”
“Your friend is in the kitchen making cocoa. I told him that you were likely dead, but he chose to stay.”
Angel nodded, heading towards the back of the house where the kitchen was. As he suspected, a horned, green demon was pouring cocoa from a saucepan into Angel’s favorite mug.
“Lorne.”
Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok Clan simply extended the mug, which he accepted.
Angel had thought he would never see the empathic demon ever again. When he asked him to kill Lindsay, he had known that he was stepping over the line, and that he and Lorne’s friendship would never recover. It wasn’t until they had been in Philadelphia for nearly two years before Lorne had suddenly shown up on their doorstep, suitcase in hand, fedora covering his horns, and declared, “I tried my own thing. It didn’t stick. You got room for one more, Cupcake?”
So thankful for his old friend, Angel immediately offered him a room. Lorne had stayed until Gunn was firmly on his feet. Once he was mobile, Lorne had bought a condemned building downtown that he was going to turn into the kind of club he had once run.
“I could hear you screaming miles away. You’re giving me a headache.” Taking a seat on one of the bar stools, Lorne ordered, “Tell me everything, starting with what’s making you so crazy.”
“I saw Buffy.”
“And?”
“And what? I saw Buffy, her Slayers tried to kill me because they thought I had attacked Faith, and then she told me that I was nothing to her.”
“You don’t think that’s something to talk about?”
“No.” Swirling the coca around in the cup, he confessed, “I don’t know how I feel. For five years, I’ve imagined…everything about her. I wondered if she cut her hair, changed her perfume, got married, had kids. Five years of wondering and I finally see her, and I just…froze.”
Lorne was quiet for a moment before venturing, “There’s more. I can feel it.”
Sorrow tearing apart his heart, Angel said, “I used to make lists of things I’d say to her, things I’d tell her, gifts I’d buy her. After we left LA, I would come up with five things every day that I would talk to her about if I saw her that day, and every day they were different. Then I stopped because it was pointless. I was never going to see her again.” Laughing mirthlessly, he quipped, “Coincidence is a bitch, right?”
“Coincidence,” Lorne echoed, taking a sip of his cocoa. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”
Angel looked at him in confusion, unsure what he meant by it. Half the time the demon was straightforward enough to make even Illyria look tactful; the other times, he was beyond cryptic.
No wonder Buffy used to hate it when I’d act that way, Angel mused.
“Don’t forget that the club opens on Saturday, and I expect you there.” As he passed by the brooding vampire, he added, “Drink your cocoa.”
* * *
Avoidance had always been one of Buffy’s most impressive talents, and today was no exception. Dodging Dawn, Rona, and Vi at breakfast, two phone calls from Faith, a slew of text messages from Xander, and an email from Willow, she was well into her self-imposed exile to maintain her Angel denial. She couldn’t handle relationship analysis from every person in her life; no, Angel business needed to be kept firmly in her own mind and away from the house of cards that she was living in.
There were times when she had almost forgotten him, forgotten Sunnydale, forgotten the life she had lived for 7 years. When they had moved to Serenity, she had made a conscious decision to distance herself from the Buffy Summers of yesteryear and create “Stepford Buffy,” as Dawn had not-so-lovingly dubbed her during a fight. Instead of vampires and demonic world domination, she worried about mowing the lawn and property taxes; instead of filling the beautiful weapons chest that Xander had made her for her 21st birthday with actual weapons, she kept spare blankets inside its wooden walls. There was nothing remotely Slayer-like in her and Dawn’s home, and that was how Buffy liked it. She wanted the whole world to see her as a perfectly normal twenty-something, unburdened by her past.
As with most things in her life though, it was a complete façade. Not even her best friends knew that she was sometimes up all night because her blood was screaming at her to hunt, to slay, and she fought the impulse so that she wouldn’t have to explain away her injuries to Jon. And Jon…God, he was such a sweet man, and he loved her, he really did, but…But she didn’t love him. Oh, she wanted to, she tried to, she ached to, but it wasn’t there. Maybe if Angel hadn’t returned, maybe if the ember she kept buried in her chest hadn’t leapt to life when she had seen him, she could’ve continued on, convincing herself it was love, but she knew now that things weren’t going to be the same.
But then again, it wasn’t the first time that she had tried to talk herself into a relationship. If Riley Finn had taught her anything, it was that.
”You know, you and Sam didn’t have to help us move in,” Buffy commented as she set down the last of the boxes in what was going to be the living room. What had possessed them to move to humid Pennsylvania in the middle of July was beyond her, but, when Sam had emailed Willow about help with a spell for their unit, her ex had offered to drive up from Washington and help them.
Riley just smiled and shrugged. “You’d do it for me.”
“I think you’re giving me too much credit.” Sinking back onto the couch, Buffy stared at the man she had once called her lover. He looked older now, and, she realized, he was. Neither of them were the same people they had been when they were together, and that was good for both of them. They were friends now, something they had never been when they were together, and for Buffy, who considered friendship a luxury, it was something she enjoyed.
“It’s a nice house. Sam and I keep talking about getting one, moving out of the apartment, but we’re not home enough for it.”
“The appeal of secret, demon fighting agents is too seductive?”
“We all have our addictions.”
“I think I’d like a nice, safe addiction, like reality TV or gator wrestling. A little boredom would be nice.”
“Boredom?” He laughed. “I don’t think you’re built for boredom; you can’t live the lives we do and be boring.”
“Well, I have retired from excitement. Maybe I’ll buy a cat and knit afghans. Of course, I’ll need to learn how to knit…and actually figure out what an afghan is.”
“Buffy-“
“Is it like a doily?”
“Buffy-“
“What exactly is the purpose of a doily anyway?”
“Buffy!” At her pause, he ventured, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Willow told me about LA, about Angel.”
She froze, her anxious hands falling into her lap. After several deep breaths, in soft, measured tones, she stated, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yeah, she said that.”
Fire in her green eyes, she demanded, “Why do you even care? You hated Angel; you made that perfectly clear.”
“No, I hated Spike. Angel, I didn’t even know him. And the one time I met him, he made it perfectly clear that you two were hardly over. It doesn’t inspire kindness.”
“Riley, I can’t-I just can’t.”
Taking a seat beside her, he laid a comforting hand atop hers. “Look, I know we usually stay in neutral areas when we talk, but I know how much you loved him, and I know that you’re hurting. I’d like to help.”
But of all people, Riley couldn’t help because every time she looked at him, she remembered what it felt like to let someone down when you couldn’t love them the way they needed to be loved.
She wondered if Angel had felt that way when he used to look at her.
“You look as if you’re in a completely different world,” a familiar accented voice said from over her shoulder.
Spinning around, Buffy couldn’t help but grin at the surprising sight of Giles standing in the doorway of her kitchen. He visited Pennsylvania often, but his permanent residence was in England, and, even though she was an adult now, there were still times when she wanted to be sixteen again so that Giles could swoop in and make everything better. For all of his meddling and lecturing, he was the closest thing to a father that she had in her life, and she always missed him when he was gone.
“You’re supposed to be in a completely different country,” she countered, wiping her flour covered hands on a nearby towel. “Aren’t you and Will supposed to be communing with the earth spirits or something?”
“Willow is in deep meditation with the coven, searching for more Slayers, but I’m expendable to the cause. I caught the Concord and paid a ghastly amount for a ticket so that-“
“So that you could come here and make sure I don’t open a wrist because I found out Angel didn’t die after all?”
Giles smirked. “Perhaps I wanted to be in town for your birthday.”
“Perhaps you’re full of shit.”
Drawing her into a brief hug, he teasingly chastised, “That’s no way to speak to your old Watcher.”
“Oh, you can take it.” Turning her attention back to the pizza crust she had been making, she asked, “So did they call you, tell you to talk to me? I mean, they had to of, right? For you to be here in under 24 hours is quite impressive, even by Scooby standards.”
“They’re just concerned.”
“Why can’t you guys just believe that I’m not as spun by this as you think?”
“Because I know you. As…conflicted as I am in my feelings towards Angel, I do remember how passionately the two of you felt towards each other, and what it was like for you when you thought he had passed. To discover that he’s alive must be…disconcerting to say the very least.”
“If those passionate feelings had been shared, he wouldn’t have hidden out for 5 years.” Strong fists beating the dough, she ranted, “For five years, I had to think about what it was like for him at the end, whether or not he had been in pain or if it had been torture or if he had known he was going to die, and this whole time he’s been living it up, not even caring enough to pick up the goddamn phone and let me know that he’s fine. Why the hell would that bother me?”
“Yes, I can see you’re completely fine with things. Tell me, is the dough dead yet?”
Realizing that she was about to break the countertop, she withdrew her betraying hands. With a sigh, she admitted, “I don’t even know how to begin to explain how I feel, and everyone wants this short, sweet adjective to sum this up. No one understands. I mean, Tara died and Anya died and they didn’t come back. And Xander wants me to tell Angel to go die because he’s still angry that Anya’s not coming back, and Will wants me to jump him because she still misses Tara so bad, and I…I don’t know what I am.”
“Confusion is to be expected at this point. What you’re going through-“
“No offense, Giles, but I don’t want a speech on how my feelings are justified.”
“Then that begs the question: what do you want?”
“I want to finish making this pizza and then I’m going to watch a movie,” she dodged. “You wanna join me? I’ll even add olives just like you like.”
Giles allowed her to sidestep once again, and she was grateful for it. Besides, if she knew Giles, this was hardly the last she’d hear of things.
* * *
Faith Wood had many traits that were admirable, but her resourcefulness never failed to impress her husband. As he sat on their couch playing with Liam, trying desperately to make up for screaming at him the night before, he watched as Faith, hands bandaged, was using every underworld connection she had to find out where exactly Angel was hiding himself.
Liam was in the middle of cocking his arm back, prepared to launch his Nerf football, when Faith shouted, “You know where everybody is, asshole! You can find anyone! How fucking rare is a vampire with a soul?!”
“Mommy said a bad word,” Liam informed his father, who struggled to catch the purple ball.
Robin winced at both his wife’s language and the way that apparently his son now knew which words were bad ones. “Buddy, why don’t you go get in your pajamas and I’ll be back in a minute to read your book, okay?”
Sticking out his lower lip, he began to whine, but Faith, who was angrily pacing with the portable phone, scooped him up, whispered something in his ear, and then set him back down. As he raced back the hall, Robin began, “Faith-“
“Yeah, I’m still here! Where would I go?” After a beat, she sighed in happiness, a smile stretching across her features. “You’re a prince, Richard. Just for this, I won’t kick your ass for jerking me around for the last hour.”
“Good news?” Robin interpreted, trying to keep his calm.
“Angel’s in Philly.”
“So he’s in Philly. How does that affect us?”
Blinking in surprise, Faith just said, “It’s Angel, Robin. I owed him my life before he saved me from those vamps last night. And…And I owe it to Buffy.”
“If memory serves, she told him to get away from her.” Getting to his feet, Robin began, “I know that you and Angel were friends, that you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him, and I appreciate him for that. And if you want to go see him to thank you or to invite him to dinner, hey, I’ll cook. But going to see him to try to play Chuck Woolery, that’s not cool.”
“You don’t get it. He and Buffy…I fucked with them a lot back in the day; I specialized in trying to break them up. And, yeah, we’re cool now, but I know that she’s still in love with him. Someone’s gotta do something, and those two are both way too stubborn to do it themselves.”
“I think that it’s a bad idea, but somehow, I don’t think that matters.”
Pressing a gentle kiss to his lips, she sighed against his mouth, “I love you, and I love that you’re going to let me take the car and not stress me over this.”
Robin kissed her, simultaneously loving and hating her sense of absoluteness, at the way that she refused to see any gray in situations but immediately broke things down to black and white. While he had learned in Sunnydale that sometimes there were more shades in the world than he could fathom, Faith, who had once refused to do anything but live in the gray, had become quite definite about right and wrong.
Two little arms were wrapped around their legs, and, as they looked down, Liam’s dark eyes stared up at them, Goodnight, Moon clutched in his hands. “Group hug.”
Faith smiled, kissed the top of his curly head, and gave Robin one final kiss. As the door to their house swung shut, Faith glimpsed the life she had built for herself, the life that she had never even fathomed. Her life wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Angel, and she’d be damned if she didn’t try to give him back even a fraction of the happiness that she lived with.
* * *
The Bronze was packed to capacity for the Spring Fling, and Angel felt incredibly out of place as he watched Buffy, beautiful in her wrinkled white gown and drying hair, push her way through the throng, Willow’s hand in her own so that she wouldn’t lose her, her laughter loud yet subtly fragile. The Master’s bite was covered by a gauze bandage that Giles had applied, and Angel was more than shocked at the way she had refused to go home but instead go to this dance despite the fact that she had actually died earlier tonight.
He wasn’t sure why he was still here. Xander certainly didn’t like his presence and made it known at every possible moment; Willow, while certainly not unkind, was unsure how to behave around him; and Angel felt powerfully out of place within this teen club. He did not even remember what it felt like to be this young and carefree, and he felt as if he was encroaching upon Buffy’s life.
Determined to leave her to her friends, he was preparing to melt into the shadows when a familiar, strong hand clamped onto his forearm, stilling his movement.
“Sneaking off?” Buffy asked, a knowing look filling her green eyes.
“I was just…It’s not…”
“Not really your scene?” she prompted.
Angel nodded. “I think I’m past my Spring Fling prime.”
Disappointment briefly flashing over her features, she echoed his nod, unconsciously hugging her body. “Yeah, I mean, vampires probably don’t go to lame high school dances. In fact, I don’t even know why I’m here. God, this place is terminally uncool, right? You should definitely go.”
Angel was used to the babbling; it was Buffy’s go-to response whenever she became agitated. But it was the way she seemed to be folding in on herself, the way her eyes were darting around the room as if she was assessing the threat level of Cordelia and her equally vapid posse. She was starting to break, the insanity of the night finally sinking in, and Angel wished that he could do something to make things better.
“Do you want to dance?” Angel asked instead, forgetting everything that he had previously thought.
Buffy nodded, gracious tears pricking at her eyes as she let him lead her to the floor. As Angel wrapped his arms around her, he felt the steady rhythm of her heart pounding against his chest, smelled the salt of her few tears, and he knew that he would do anything to protect this girl.
He loved her far too much to let something bad happen.
Angel was deeply slumbering on the couch, a small smile playing at his lips, and Lorne would’ve woken him if not for the fact that it was the first time he had seen his old friend smile in months.
LA had changed all of them, but perhaps it was Angel that had changed the most. The man that Lorne had known, the confused vampire that had sought refuge in LA and was desperately trying to muddle through the complexities of life, was no longer there; he had known that when he had asked him to kill Lindsay 5 years ago. But the collateral damage of taking on the Black Thorn had made him more cautious, even more reserved, and he had stopped trying to achieve any sort of happiness. Lorne couldn’t hate that man, but he did pity him.
The knock on the door was surprising considering that none of them had friends. Gunn tended to only venture out with Angel or Illyria just in case he ran into trouble, and Angel and Illyria certainly didn’t have friends. No, when Lorne opened the door to the house that wasn’t his, he was surprised someone was there, but he was not entirely shocked that it was Faith.
Closing the door so that she couldn’t enter, he quipped, “You’re not the Slayer that should be here.”
“Hey, Lorne. I need to talk to Angel.”
“He’s a little unconscious right now, muffin. Can I take a message?”
“I really need to talk to him.”
“About a certain fair-haired Slayer he ran into recently?” The green skinned demon smiled knowingly. “I think we should talk.”
* * *
The last thing that Buffy wanted to do was celebrate her birthday. After the past four days, the only thing that she really wanted to do was hang out with her friends in her house, gorging on heaping mounds of Chinese food and watching movies that Dawn would inevitably tease them all about, calling them old. In her fantasy birthday extravaganza, she would be wearing her absolutely ancient Sunnydale High gym shorts that had somehow ended up amongst the clothing she had fled town with, the shirt of her mother’s that she had kept because once it had smelled of her mother’s perfume, and her hair would all be atop her head, her face scrubbed clean of make-up.
In reality, Jon was taking her to dinner at some new chic restaurant in Philadelphia, followed by dancing at a club that Faith had recommended. Buffy had wanted to tell him no, but he was so excited and had put so much effort into the planning, even willing to go dancing despite the fact that his dance ability made Xander’s Snoopy Dance look like a Justin Timberlake video. If she bailed, she would permanently ruin her relationship with Jon, and, no matter how conflicted she was about Angel’s recent resurrection, she didn’t want to hurt him.
“Buffy, Jon’s here!” Giles called back the hall.
Struggling to get the strap of her heel around her ankle, Buffy shuffled over to the closet, desperately trying to find the jade necklace that Tara had bought her for her twenty-first birthday that would match the green band in her dress. As she reached for the box where she kept all of her jewelry, her hand bumped a shoebox atop the shelf, sending its contents scattering across the carpet. It wasn’t until she was already bending to pick things up that she realized it was her Angel box.
Inside the walls of the shoebox was every artifact from her and Angel’s relationship. There was the dried rose he had given her on their first date, the ticket stub from Banquet d’Amelia, a piece of the gown she had worn the Halloween that Ethan Rayne worked his magick; several sheets of paper, mostly notes that he would slip into her schoolbooks for her to find during the day, were all but falling apart in their old age, but there was one that remained almost as perfect as the day she had found it. It was Angelus’s drawing of her sleeping, the one he had left on her pillow only a few days before he had murdered Jenny Calendar. She still wasn’t sure why she kept it; maybe it was because he had always told her that he would draw her, but he had lost his soul before she had ever gotten the chance to pose for him. But whatever it was, Buffy felt herself tearing up as she stared at herself, barely seventeen-years-old, forever captured by her lover.
“Buffy!” Dawn squawked as she entered the room. “Jon’s waiting!”
Buffy quickly got to her feet, leaving the remnants of her past relationship on the plush carpet. Grabbing the necklace out of the box she had intended to grab, Buffy snapped, “I’m coming, Dawnie! Jesus!”
As she moved to walk past her little sister, Dawn caught her arm. Taller than Buffy, even when she was wearing spiked heels, Dawn met her gaze steadily, pressing a small box into her hand. “Happy birthday, Buffy.”
Buffy tiredly smiled, obediently lifting the lid to find a small, silver guardian angel pin nestled in cotton. As tears came unbidden to her eyes, Dawn self-consciously explained, “You gave that to me before the final fight in Sunnydale. You said that, if you didn’t make it back, that I’d need a guardian angel. I figured, with the way your birthdays usually go, you might need one.”
Wrapping her up in a hug, Buffy murmured, “Thank you.”
“Buffy, do try to be prompt! You’re going to miss your reservation!” Giles cried.
Setting Dawn’s gift on her dresser, Buffy made her way out into the living room, where Jon was patiently waiting in his coat and tie, his somewhat thinning blonde hair carefully combed in place. He smiled the moment she entered the room, affection shining in his eyes, and Buffy wished that she could summon up the enthusiasm for tonight that he seemed to have.
“You look lovely,” Jon drawled, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Don’t look a day over twenty.”
“That’s what every girl loves hear,” she attempted to joke, picking up the shawl that she had bought specifically for this dress, hoping her bad mood didn’t reflect in her voice.
“Well, you two have fun tonight,” Giles encouraged, sounding very much like the father he was to her, “and don’t drink too much. If you need anything-“
“Giles, I’m 28 today,” Buffy interrupted. “I think I can handle tonight.”
He smiled, realizing that he sounded like an old man. “Yes, well, do enjoy yourself. No unpleasantness tonight.”
Slightly stiffening at Giles’s not-so-subtle reference to the past few days, Jon simply agreed before leading her out to his car.
* * *
The restaurant was bathed in candlelight, music lightly filled the air from a string quartet, and no one in the restaurant seemed to be under the age of 40 except for Jon and Buffy. She felt woefully out of place, as if she was a child playing in her mother’s cocktail dress, but Jon moved with the ease he always did, ordering a bottle of expensive wine. As they made small talk and ate their extremely overpriced meals, Buffy felt her Slayer senses tugging at her body. There were no vampires in the restaurant, no demons visible, but her instincts were screaming at her that they were close by.
No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t shake it. When they walked down the sidewalk, Buffy began to scan the area, trying to find out where her feeling was coming from. The last thing she needed was to be jumped by a gang of vampires like Faith had been and have to reveal her secret identity to Jon. Just as she was about to scream from the agitation that was growing in her stomach, Jon gestured to the building they were standing in front of. A bright blue neon sign was glowing against the inky black sky, proudly announcing that this was Club Caritas.
As Jon handed the cover charge to the bouncer at the door, Buffy tried to remember where exactly she had heard the word before, how she knew it. It wasn’t until they were inside and Buffy saw the unique clientele that the memory bloomed full in her mind.
”A demon karaoke bar?” she had laughed as they sat on the hood of Angel’s car, gazing out at the ocean, trying to simulate regular conversation as if she hadn’t just been raised from the dead by her best friends.
Angel softly chuckled. “It’s bizarre, I know, but Caritas is actually one of the best allies I have.”
“Caritas?”
“It’s Latin for mercy.”
Once upon a time, Buffy had told Giles that she didn’t believe in leprechauns or coincidence. Giles had joked that, while he did not know of leprechauns, perhaps coincidence did exist.
If this was just a coincidence, Buffy would eat her purse.
“Faith didn’t tell me this was a costume bar,” Jon naively said as a red, horned demon passed them, raising his beer in greeting to a Polgara demon across the bar.
“No, I bet she didn’t,” Buffy agreed, seething with anger. She was going to kill her sister Slayer. Dismemberment would be a good start. Maybe some light torture before hand to make her suffer, but there would definitely be dismemberment. Maybe she’d just rent Hostel to get some ideas…
“Greetings and salutations!” a demon the color of split pea soup exclaimed, throwing open his arms which were draped in the ugliest purple suit Buffy had ever seen. “Welcome to Club Caritas, a sanctuary to all those who enter. I’m Lorne, proprietor, bartender, performer, and shoulder to cry on.”
Jon laughed at the picture this man presented. “Very nice to meet you. I’m Jon and this is my girlfriend Buffy.”
“Buffy,” Lorne repeated, taking her hand in his, pressing a kiss to it in old chivalrous fashion. “What an unusual name. Where does it come from?”
Buffy knew she was being baited, but, as always, she had never been able to resist like a grown-up would. “California. Sunnydale, specifically.”
“I’m a transplanted Angeleno myself. Us Californians should stick together, don’t you think?” Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, he said to Jon, “Do you mind if I borrow your girlfriend for a few moments, swap California stories?”
Jon wavered a bit as he said, “Well, it’s her birthday and we’re celebrating-“
“Why don’t you go to the bar and talk to Diego? Tell me that I’ve comped you for drinks all night. I’ll only have her a few minutes. You don’t mind, do you, Cupcake?”
Resisting the urge to smile, Buffy just agreed, “Not at all. Would you order me a Manhattan with two cherries?”
Jon agreed, disappearing into the crowd of humans and demons while Lorne led her towards the back room. The moment the door had shut, Buffy demanded, “What is going on?!”
“It’s very nice to meet you. You are quite the legend. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about the infamous Buffy Summers. I feel like I should do a sweeping bow or curtsy.”
“Who are you? How did my sister get an invitation to this place? Why would Faith recommend that my boyfriend bring me here? What is this, some massive conspiracy? Is Angel waiting in a closet to stomp on my heart to make this birthday complete?”
Picking up a framed photo that he had on his desk, he said, “I know that you’ll find this hard to believe, but Angel…He’s not real big on the whole doing what’s best for him thing. Sometimes, he needs a little push.”
“And you’re the guy behind him on the cliff?”
“In LA, when things got bad, he was just spilling out emotions, which, as I’m sure you know, is extremely rare. He was just screaming out all of these feelings-“
“Does this have a point?”
Glaring at her for daring to interrupt his monologue, Lorne snapped, “Patience! Anyway, the thing I kept getting the most was regret. Which, I know, a vampire with a soul full of regret is about as commonplace as Paris Hilton filled with an ugly Greek. But it was different. I think that of everything he regretted, you were what he regretted the most.”
It was as if he had thrust a blade through her heart. “Gee, you sure know how to make a girl want to slit her wrists.”
“He regrets leaving you, sweetbreads. And seeing you just brought all of that back. He loves you, Buffy. He misses you. And if those vibes you’re giving off are telling me anything, it’s that you feel the same way.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you think you know about my relationship with Angel, but you have no idea what it was like. He left me. He’d profess his love and then he’d leave. I buried my friends, lost my home, lost everything, and he didn’t even ask me to stay. Do you know what that’s like?”
Turning the picture frame around, Buffy saw that it was a picture taken at Christmas time. Angel was in the center with Cordelia, Wesley, Lorne, the man from the other night, and an unfamiliar woman all surrounding him, smiles galore as they stood in the lobby of a hotel.
“I have an idea.” Replacing the photo on his desk, he handed her a scrap of paper with an address written on it in bold hand. “In case you change your mind.” Brushing past her, he added, “Wouldn’t want to keep your boyfriend waiting.”
* * *
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jon pressed as he drove Buffy home. He had been hoping for a romantic interlude, but she had struck with a sudden headache at the strange club that Faith had referred them to.
“I’ll be fine. We’ll go out again and celebrate right, I promise.” Pressing a kiss to his cheek, she said, “Thank you for a nice birthday.”
“No problem. I love you.”
“I love you too,” she replied by rote, feeling hollow in her heart. From the moment that Lorne had given her that address, she felt as if it were burning a hole in her purse, and it was driving her crazy. She needed to get away from Jon, sort her head out, and figure out what she was going to do about Angel. You know, after she murdered Faith for setting her up.
Giles and Dawn were on the couch watching Monty Python, Dawn reciting along with the movie, and Buffy locked eyes with her Watcher. He said nothing, asked no questions, but Buffy felt as if he was demanding answers to questions that she wasn’t prepared to face.
“How was dinner?” Dawn queried, not taking her eyes off of the screen.
“It was fine.”
“I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Jon didn’t want to put out?” she teased.
Buffy just shook her head, heading to her room to change. The moment she crossed the threshold, she saw all of the things she had spilled on the floor, and she began to gather them, slowly replacing them in the box. She was halfway to placing it back on the shelf when she heard Giles say from the doorway, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see him.”
With a sigh, she took a seat on the bed, toeing off her shoes. “I want to be over him. I want to be normal. What I had with Angel wasn’t normal.”
“Buffy, one of your best friends is one of the world’s most powerful witches while the other was engaged to a vengeance demon. Your sister was once a mystical ball of energy, dozens of Slayers look to you as inspiration, and you can hunt and kill supernatural creatures. No matter how we dress things up, none of us are normal.”
“Jon’s normal.”
Unsure what to say, he simply agreed, “Yes.”
“You set me up with him because he was.”
“You needed normalcy.”
Realizing what he said, she asked, surprise evident in her voice, “Did you get me a rebound guy?”
Giles sniggered. “I’m not your…pimp, Buffy. I simply wanted to see you smile again.”
Unfastening her necklace, she admitted, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Go for a drive. See where it takes you.”
* * *
The house was big, set back from the road with large shrubs around it. There was something about it that reminded Buffy of the mansion on Crawford Street; maybe it was the way that it seemed to be shadowed despite the street lights or the sense of elegance that it implied. No matter what, it screamed “Angel’s house.”
For fifteen minutes she paced along the driveway, trying to determine whether or not she was going to actually ring the bell, before finally sucking it up and marching to the door, pressing the bell and then bracing herself.
A moment later, an extremely thin brunette that she recognized from Lorne’s picture answered the door, a small smile on her lips. Her accent was pure Texas as she said, “Hi, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Angel.”
“And you are?”
“I’m Buffy…Summers.”
“Oh.” To Buffy’s amazement, the beautiful girl’s appearance shimmered and then her skin and hair were streaked with blue, her clothing now a leather catsuit. “I am Illyria. Angel is upstairs. Please come in.”
Confused, Buffy followed, suddenly struck with an extreme sense of unease. Who was this girl? Why did she look like she had fallen into a vat of Slurpee mix? Who was she to Angel?
The man from the other night was sitting on the couch watching a basketball game, and, when he saw Illyria’s appearance and Buffy’s expression, he said, “Damn, girl! What did we tell you about dropping your look?”
“She is the Slayer. I cannot startle her.” With an indifferent shrug, she informed him, “She’d like to see Angel. I’ll get him.”
Buffy was still in shock as the woman departed, and Gunn chuckled as he said, “Don’t mind her. She’s not exactly acclimated to the world yet.” Slowly getting to his feet, he extended his hand. “We didn’t get to meet earlier. I’m Gunn.”
She shook the proffered hand. “Buffy.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve heard about you.”
“Apparently, everyone has.”
“Everyone?”
“I met Lorne earlier.”
Gunn nodded. “Yeah, the new Caritas opens tonight. We’re going but not till later. Angel’s not big on crowds, Illyria doesn’t understand human behavior, and the cane is shockingly not a chick magnet.”
“If you don’t mind me asking-“
Knowing the question, he cut in, “I got hurt in LA at the end, had a stroke. Like getting tackled on the one yard line, you know?”
Thinking of Anya, Buffy just nodded.
“I ain’t bitter though. Could’ve died, right?”
She felt him before he said a word. It had always been that way, that deep pull in the center of her being that let her know that Angel was in the area. When she was 16, it had caused butterflies to explode in her stomach; at 28, it made her wish she was 16 again when the world had been far less complicated.
“Buffy.”
“Angel.”
They stood there, five feet between them, five years separating them, and for the first time in her life, Buffy Summers was absolutely speechless.
When he took a tentative step towards her, the dam inside her broke, and she rushed him, throwing herself into his arms, face buried in his broad chest, inhaling the scent of him as her fingers curled into the soft fabric of his shirt. His hands were softly stroking her back as he pressed his lips against the crown of her head.
“You’re real,” she sighed, hot tears streaming down her face. “You’re real and you’re here.”
“Buffy-“
Not caring how pathetic she seemed, how needy she felt, she sobbed, “I missed you. I missed you so much, and I thought you were dead. I thought I’d never see you again.”
Pulling back, staring into her wet face, Angel realized that she wasn’t the girl he had known. She was an adult now, a woman, and age had only made her more beautiful. But as beautiful as she now, the vulnerability in her eyes was the same as it had been when Angelus had broken her heart at 17, when he had broken up with her in the sewer, when he had told her on the Day That Wasn’t that he had asked the Oracles to change things back.
“Please don’t cry,” he managed, using a thumb to wipe away a tear.
“Why? Why?” she kept repeating, wishing she could be more articulate.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt. I was scared that they’d come after you.”
“You should’ve told me! I have an army of Slayers! Who could’ve hurt me?”
“Buffy...”
“If you didn’t want me-“
As he pressed his lips against hers with a ferocity that belied his usually calm manner, Buffy couldn’t help but think about how he tasted exactly the same as he had that last night in Sunnydale, like coffee with a twinge of copper that he could never quite hide. She had never been able to drink coffee without thinking of his kisses.
When he pulled back, they gazed at each other for a moment before Angel whispered, “Happy birthday.”
Eleven years before, her entire life had changed when she had spent her birthday with Angel. The world had tilted on its axis and nothing had ever been the same. She had never been the same.
Tonight, the same thing was happening. As she stood in the circle of Angel’s arms, 11 years older and infinitely wiser, the world was tilting again.
This time, however, Buffy was not only prepared, she welcomed it. For the first time since Sunnydale, Buffy Summers felt as if she was alive again, as if that long dead part of her heart had suddenly burst back to life.
And as she raised herself up for another kiss, she just savored the moment because she knew that when she actually stopped to analyze everything, all of the impossibilities were going to be there, the curse was going to be there, her boyfriend was going to be there, but she didn’t care.
No, tonight was her birthday, and she was just going to savor her Angel. She’d worry about the rest tomorrow.
Tonight, she was going to celebrate all of the coincidences that had led them here, led her back to him. Tonight, she was going to be happy.
Author: total_fangirl
Rating: R for language and sexuality
Word Count: 9126
Spoilers: Anything from any season is fair game
Summary: 5 years after “Not Fade Away,” Buffy is living in Pennsylvania when she discovers that Angel didn’t die in LA after all.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Serenity, PA is completely made up, and the only characters that are mine are Jon and Liam
Notes: I tried to stay as close to the request as possible, and, while this is B/A, there is some B/OC (though nothing explicit). Flashbacks are in italics. Written for the cya_ficathon and much love to bklyangel for all of her feedback!
The Request: 5 years after the Angel finale, and B/A haven't spoken since "Chosen". How does their reunion go? Can be set anywhere the author is comfortable with, include any other characters, any rating - I don't really want a super fluffy or super angsty ending - somewhere in between. Things to include: a dinner out, an old photograph (or drawing, I guess, since this is Angel...), no Shanshu.
It was like falling back in time as she stared at the vampire that she had thought that she had lost. Suddenly, she was sixteen all over again and seeing him across the Bronze, her heart beating so wildly that it felt as if it would explode out of her chest, every nerve singing because he was here, he was really here.
Five years. For five years, she had dreamt of this moment, of the day that Angel would come back to her, and she had imagined her reaction differently every time. No matter what trite dialogue her mind inserted in the fantasy, it always ended the same way: with her throwing her arms around him and kissing him until she couldn’t breathe. After they were done, he would tell her how he wanted her to be his forever, screw what was right or proper, and then they would live happily ever after. That was the fantasy.
But this was the reality, and the last thing that Buffy wanted was to kiss the man before her, the one that was staring at her as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he was happy to see her.
Robin jerked his hand out of her grasp and demanded, “What’s going on? Who are you?”
The gasp behind Buffy prompted her to turn, seeing the wide range of emotions playing over Dawn’s face. Even if the younger girl had been closer to Spike than Angel, Angel had always had an almost mythic quality to him that Dawn had been fascinated with when she was a child; she had always seen Angel as perfect. That is, until he left Sunnydale. After that, Dawn had never uttered a positive syllable about the souled vampire. However, when she had heard the news of his demise, she had cried along with her sister. A walking contradiction: that was Dawnie.
“Angel,” Dawn breathed, slowly moving forward, despite Buffy grabbing at her arm. “Is that you?”
Despite the fact that he was being held by several angry Slayers, despite the fact that Faith’s husband wanted nothing more than to stake him right now, despite the fact that the love of his life was staring at him as if she didn’t even know who he was, he couldn’t help but smile at the sight of little Dawn all grown-up. “It’s me.”
Dawn’s blue eyes locked with Buffy’s green ones, indefinite emotions flying between them. Finally, she ventured, “Buffy?”
“Let him go,” the blonde Slayer ordered the others.
“Are you kidding?” Kennedy snapped. “This guy tried to kill Faith.”
“You don’t know that. We can’t do anything rash.”
Pure condescension on her face, Kennedy drawled, “What a surprise. Buffy would rather protect her boyfriend than do what’s best for us.”
“Shut up!” Dawn ordered. “You don’t understand anything!”
“What, like this is any different from what she did with Spike? Apparently, if you fuck her, that means you can kill whoever you want!”
It happened so fast that even Buffy didn’t have time to register what was going on. Suddenly, Kennedy was being suspended half of a foot off the ground by Angel’s hand around her neck, the other Slayers, new to the game, so shocked that they backed up.
“Apologize,” he growled, his fingertips pressing painfully into her flesh.
Buffy quickly made her way over to him, kicking him hard behind the knee, bringing him down and sending Kennedy sprawling back onto Robin and Faith’s manicured lawn. As she crab walked as fast as she could to get out of reach of the vampire, Angel stared up at Buffy from his position on his knees. When he said, “Buffy,” his eyes full of pain, the memory of him on his knees after killing Pete, his arms wrapped around her waist, back in her life after the first time she had thought she had permanently lost him was just too much.
“Take your friend and get out,” Buffy ordered, clearly trying to keep the tears out of her voice. “You aren’t welcome here.”
Slowly climbing to his feet, he blurted out, “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t owe you any explanations. You’re nothing to me.”
For the first time in her life, Buffy walked away from Angel, leaving him to stare after her, anguish tearing through him.
* * *
“Buffy-“
“I don’t want to talk about it, Dawn.”
“But Angel’s alive. And you sent him away. Either one of those things is good for a lifetime of conversation.”
Buffy finally looked up from the photo album that Xander and Willow had given her for Christmas the past year. It had taken them awhile to gather up enough pictures for the album; they had asked everyone they knew for copies of photos from Sunnydale that, when combined with those that they had managed to salvage before the great escape, gave Buffy the only actual proof that Sunnydale had been real.
“Dawnie, I made my peace with Angel a long time ago. I’m with Jon and I’m happy. I don’t need…I don’t need him anymore.”
No malice in her tone, she scoffed, “Liar.”
“Dawn-“
“Don’t shut me out here, Buffy! You hafta be freaking out, so let’s talk about it.”
“Go to bed, Dawnie.”
Crossing her arms across her chest, she said, “I’m not a little kid anymore. You can’t send me to my room.”
Buffy’s tone was slightly pleading as she repeated herself. Dawn stared at her big sister, at how tired she appeared, and she sagged with defeat, obediently heading towards her room, closing Buffy’s door behind her. She was familiar with Buffy’s emotional lockdown; she wasn’t going to be sharing anything until she was good and ready, no matter how hard Dawn tried.
Of course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t use someone else as her confessional, which was exactly why Dawn immediately got on the phone to England. When in doubt, call the best friend.
* * *
Angel had always hated getting his picture taken. She must’ve tried dozens of times during their relationship to get him to hold still long enough to get a photo, but Angel always seemed to hate looking at himself. Buffy had chalked it up to the soul, to self-hatred, but that didn’t stop her from wanting a picture of him. When Connor had called her five years ago to tell her that Angel had passed away, part of what made the grief so despairing was that there was no proof that he had even existed. For awhile, Buffy had wondered if maybe he had just been some fantasy, a hallucination that she had created to make her teenage years slightly less painful.
And then there he was, and suddenly she remembered just how real Angel was and always had been.
How could she have ever doubted that he had been real when no other person had ever been able to turn her inside out so completely?
With a groan, she closed the photo album and crossed to her closet. Setting the album on the shelf, she grabbed her battered pair of sneakers and slid them on, lacing them tightly. She needed to clear her mind, and, as she had found out in Italy, running was the quickest way to do so. More than once Giles had hinted that he thought she was trying to outrun her problems by pushing her body to the breaking point, some days running a marathon’s length to “de-stress”, but Buffy didn’t want her Watcher’s psychoanalysis. If she could manage to deal with her pain without ever committing a felony, unlike Faith, then she figured she earned the right to be left alone.
The night was still as her feet pounded against the pavement of her neighborhood, the cold air no relief for her overheated skin as she progressed from a jog to a full-on sprint.
She needed to forget what it was like to see Angel standing there, so amazingly alive, flesh and blood when she had thought he was nothing but dust long ago.
She needed to forget what it was like to realize that the man she had loved for the past twelve years hadn’t ever bothered to contact her to let her know that he had, in fact, survived the horrors of his last stand.
She needed to forget what it was like to be pulled apart by every conflicting emotion in her body the moment she laid eyes on the one person she had ever fully given her heart to.
She needed to just forget.
As she returned to her house, slowed her pace, her muscles burning from exertion, sweat rolling down her face, she began to cough as oxygen wasn’t filling her lungs as quickly as she needed it. When the coughs turned to sobs, Buffy slid to her knees on her front lawn, too exhausted to even move towards the front door.
After everything that had happened, Buffy Summers was right back where she had started.
* * *
Angel had been silent the entire drive back to Philadelphia, his hands conspicuously tight as he clutched the steering wheel. Gunn watched his best friend carefully, trying to gauge how exactly to approach the situation at hand, before he realized that he was incredibly out of his depth here. Until tonight, Gunn had never met the famous Buffy Summers; all of his knowledge about the Slayer was secondhand accounts from Cordy and Wes. Whenever the Buffy topic had been broached in the past, it had been them who had handled the surly vampire. Without them, Gunn had no idea what the appropriate sentiment was for, “So you wanna talk about how the love of your life just destroyed you emotionally?”
However, Gunn still needed to try because God knew that Angel had been there for him.
When Gunn had woken up at Sedars-Cinai Hospital, he had been attached to every machine known to man and he could not feel the entire left side of his body. A breathing tube was down his throat, and Gunn had been grasping for a call button when he had felt a cold hand against his skin. Unable to move his neck, which was held in place by a halo for a spinal injury, he had shifted his eyes to see Angel sitting beside his bed, his face mottled with bruises of varying shades, an ugly gash covering his forehead, his clothes dirty and covered in holes.
He had tried to speak despite the impossibility it posed, and Angel had said, “You’re gonna be fine. Don’t try to struggle.”
“Yes, that could hurt you more,” Illyria’s monotone informed him. The demon’s voice wasn’t her own though; it was heavy with a Texas accent that Gunn knew all too well. When his eyes found her, his suspicion was confirmed; Illyria was taking Fred’s form so that she wouldn’t startle the medical staff.
Gunn gurgled in his throat, his right hand reaching for the breathing tube, but Angel stilled him, telling him that he’d get the nurse. Once the tube was removed, Gunn swallowed heavily, trying to get the pain to subsist. Finally, he tried to speak, his words so slurred that it was almost incomprehensible.
“Where’s Spike?”
Angel’s face clouded with sadness as he just shook his head.
Gunn had a broken back, a punctured lung, severe blood loss, and had suffered a stroke. The left side of his body was paralyzed, though through physical therapy he would probably he able to walk again with some assistance. Speech therapy would be needed so that he could learn to speak clearly again, and his left hand was now basically useless. There would be no more demon fighting for Charles Gunn, the street kid that had fought to protect everyone he knew.
When the insurance money for the Hyperion, the Wolfram & Hart offices, and every vehicle came in, Angel had used the millions to start their new life. He had known that they would probably never be free of the Senior Partners, but he refused to live in fear. When he had contacted Connor to tell him he was alive, Connor had been attacked the next day by the Order of Taraka; once disposed of, Angel knew that he couldn’t contact anyone who had meant anything to him.
Philadelphia had the best rehabilitation center in the country for stroke victims, and Angel had moved them there, Illyria coming along out of the intense protective feelings she now harbored for them. For three years, no questions asked, Angel handed over money to therapists so that Gunn could return to some semblance of the man he had been. When the speech therapists recommended exercises, Angel patiently sat and went over consonant sounds with him; when the physical therapists recommended that Gunn get equipment in his home to work out with, Angel bought type of the line everything to fill a room in the house he had bought. Gunn knew that Angel’s helpfulness was almost certainly because Gunn was the very last of the Angel Investigations team, but he would never be able to fully express his gratitude to the vampire.
The lights in the massive Victorian were all on, and Illyria appeared almost instantly as they crossed the threshold. She looked them up and down before declaring, “I’m glad that the girls did not kill you.”
Gunn couldn’t help but chuckle. “Thanks.”
“Your friend is in the kitchen making cocoa. I told him that you were likely dead, but he chose to stay.”
Angel nodded, heading towards the back of the house where the kitchen was. As he suspected, a horned, green demon was pouring cocoa from a saucepan into Angel’s favorite mug.
“Lorne.”
Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok Clan simply extended the mug, which he accepted.
Angel had thought he would never see the empathic demon ever again. When he asked him to kill Lindsay, he had known that he was stepping over the line, and that he and Lorne’s friendship would never recover. It wasn’t until they had been in Philadelphia for nearly two years before Lorne had suddenly shown up on their doorstep, suitcase in hand, fedora covering his horns, and declared, “I tried my own thing. It didn’t stick. You got room for one more, Cupcake?”
So thankful for his old friend, Angel immediately offered him a room. Lorne had stayed until Gunn was firmly on his feet. Once he was mobile, Lorne had bought a condemned building downtown that he was going to turn into the kind of club he had once run.
“I could hear you screaming miles away. You’re giving me a headache.” Taking a seat on one of the bar stools, Lorne ordered, “Tell me everything, starting with what’s making you so crazy.”
“I saw Buffy.”
“And?”
“And what? I saw Buffy, her Slayers tried to kill me because they thought I had attacked Faith, and then she told me that I was nothing to her.”
“You don’t think that’s something to talk about?”
“No.” Swirling the coca around in the cup, he confessed, “I don’t know how I feel. For five years, I’ve imagined…everything about her. I wondered if she cut her hair, changed her perfume, got married, had kids. Five years of wondering and I finally see her, and I just…froze.”
Lorne was quiet for a moment before venturing, “There’s more. I can feel it.”
Sorrow tearing apart his heart, Angel said, “I used to make lists of things I’d say to her, things I’d tell her, gifts I’d buy her. After we left LA, I would come up with five things every day that I would talk to her about if I saw her that day, and every day they were different. Then I stopped because it was pointless. I was never going to see her again.” Laughing mirthlessly, he quipped, “Coincidence is a bitch, right?”
“Coincidence,” Lorne echoed, taking a sip of his cocoa. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”
Angel looked at him in confusion, unsure what he meant by it. Half the time the demon was straightforward enough to make even Illyria look tactful; the other times, he was beyond cryptic.
No wonder Buffy used to hate it when I’d act that way, Angel mused.
“Don’t forget that the club opens on Saturday, and I expect you there.” As he passed by the brooding vampire, he added, “Drink your cocoa.”
* * *
Avoidance had always been one of Buffy’s most impressive talents, and today was no exception. Dodging Dawn, Rona, and Vi at breakfast, two phone calls from Faith, a slew of text messages from Xander, and an email from Willow, she was well into her self-imposed exile to maintain her Angel denial. She couldn’t handle relationship analysis from every person in her life; no, Angel business needed to be kept firmly in her own mind and away from the house of cards that she was living in.
There were times when she had almost forgotten him, forgotten Sunnydale, forgotten the life she had lived for 7 years. When they had moved to Serenity, she had made a conscious decision to distance herself from the Buffy Summers of yesteryear and create “Stepford Buffy,” as Dawn had not-so-lovingly dubbed her during a fight. Instead of vampires and demonic world domination, she worried about mowing the lawn and property taxes; instead of filling the beautiful weapons chest that Xander had made her for her 21st birthday with actual weapons, she kept spare blankets inside its wooden walls. There was nothing remotely Slayer-like in her and Dawn’s home, and that was how Buffy liked it. She wanted the whole world to see her as a perfectly normal twenty-something, unburdened by her past.
As with most things in her life though, it was a complete façade. Not even her best friends knew that she was sometimes up all night because her blood was screaming at her to hunt, to slay, and she fought the impulse so that she wouldn’t have to explain away her injuries to Jon. And Jon…God, he was such a sweet man, and he loved her, he really did, but…But she didn’t love him. Oh, she wanted to, she tried to, she ached to, but it wasn’t there. Maybe if Angel hadn’t returned, maybe if the ember she kept buried in her chest hadn’t leapt to life when she had seen him, she could’ve continued on, convincing herself it was love, but she knew now that things weren’t going to be the same.
But then again, it wasn’t the first time that she had tried to talk herself into a relationship. If Riley Finn had taught her anything, it was that.
”You know, you and Sam didn’t have to help us move in,” Buffy commented as she set down the last of the boxes in what was going to be the living room. What had possessed them to move to humid Pennsylvania in the middle of July was beyond her, but, when Sam had emailed Willow about help with a spell for their unit, her ex had offered to drive up from Washington and help them.
Riley just smiled and shrugged. “You’d do it for me.”
“I think you’re giving me too much credit.” Sinking back onto the couch, Buffy stared at the man she had once called her lover. He looked older now, and, she realized, he was. Neither of them were the same people they had been when they were together, and that was good for both of them. They were friends now, something they had never been when they were together, and for Buffy, who considered friendship a luxury, it was something she enjoyed.
“It’s a nice house. Sam and I keep talking about getting one, moving out of the apartment, but we’re not home enough for it.”
“The appeal of secret, demon fighting agents is too seductive?”
“We all have our addictions.”
“I think I’d like a nice, safe addiction, like reality TV or gator wrestling. A little boredom would be nice.”
“Boredom?” He laughed. “I don’t think you’re built for boredom; you can’t live the lives we do and be boring.”
“Well, I have retired from excitement. Maybe I’ll buy a cat and knit afghans. Of course, I’ll need to learn how to knit…and actually figure out what an afghan is.”
“Buffy-“
“Is it like a doily?”
“Buffy-“
“What exactly is the purpose of a doily anyway?”
“Buffy!” At her pause, he ventured, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Willow told me about LA, about Angel.”
She froze, her anxious hands falling into her lap. After several deep breaths, in soft, measured tones, she stated, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yeah, she said that.”
Fire in her green eyes, she demanded, “Why do you even care? You hated Angel; you made that perfectly clear.”
“No, I hated Spike. Angel, I didn’t even know him. And the one time I met him, he made it perfectly clear that you two were hardly over. It doesn’t inspire kindness.”
“Riley, I can’t-I just can’t.”
Taking a seat beside her, he laid a comforting hand atop hers. “Look, I know we usually stay in neutral areas when we talk, but I know how much you loved him, and I know that you’re hurting. I’d like to help.”
But of all people, Riley couldn’t help because every time she looked at him, she remembered what it felt like to let someone down when you couldn’t love them the way they needed to be loved.
She wondered if Angel had felt that way when he used to look at her.
“You look as if you’re in a completely different world,” a familiar accented voice said from over her shoulder.
Spinning around, Buffy couldn’t help but grin at the surprising sight of Giles standing in the doorway of her kitchen. He visited Pennsylvania often, but his permanent residence was in England, and, even though she was an adult now, there were still times when she wanted to be sixteen again so that Giles could swoop in and make everything better. For all of his meddling and lecturing, he was the closest thing to a father that she had in her life, and she always missed him when he was gone.
“You’re supposed to be in a completely different country,” she countered, wiping her flour covered hands on a nearby towel. “Aren’t you and Will supposed to be communing with the earth spirits or something?”
“Willow is in deep meditation with the coven, searching for more Slayers, but I’m expendable to the cause. I caught the Concord and paid a ghastly amount for a ticket so that-“
“So that you could come here and make sure I don’t open a wrist because I found out Angel didn’t die after all?”
Giles smirked. “Perhaps I wanted to be in town for your birthday.”
“Perhaps you’re full of shit.”
Drawing her into a brief hug, he teasingly chastised, “That’s no way to speak to your old Watcher.”
“Oh, you can take it.” Turning her attention back to the pizza crust she had been making, she asked, “So did they call you, tell you to talk to me? I mean, they had to of, right? For you to be here in under 24 hours is quite impressive, even by Scooby standards.”
“They’re just concerned.”
“Why can’t you guys just believe that I’m not as spun by this as you think?”
“Because I know you. As…conflicted as I am in my feelings towards Angel, I do remember how passionately the two of you felt towards each other, and what it was like for you when you thought he had passed. To discover that he’s alive must be…disconcerting to say the very least.”
“If those passionate feelings had been shared, he wouldn’t have hidden out for 5 years.” Strong fists beating the dough, she ranted, “For five years, I had to think about what it was like for him at the end, whether or not he had been in pain or if it had been torture or if he had known he was going to die, and this whole time he’s been living it up, not even caring enough to pick up the goddamn phone and let me know that he’s fine. Why the hell would that bother me?”
“Yes, I can see you’re completely fine with things. Tell me, is the dough dead yet?”
Realizing that she was about to break the countertop, she withdrew her betraying hands. With a sigh, she admitted, “I don’t even know how to begin to explain how I feel, and everyone wants this short, sweet adjective to sum this up. No one understands. I mean, Tara died and Anya died and they didn’t come back. And Xander wants me to tell Angel to go die because he’s still angry that Anya’s not coming back, and Will wants me to jump him because she still misses Tara so bad, and I…I don’t know what I am.”
“Confusion is to be expected at this point. What you’re going through-“
“No offense, Giles, but I don’t want a speech on how my feelings are justified.”
“Then that begs the question: what do you want?”
“I want to finish making this pizza and then I’m going to watch a movie,” she dodged. “You wanna join me? I’ll even add olives just like you like.”
Giles allowed her to sidestep once again, and she was grateful for it. Besides, if she knew Giles, this was hardly the last she’d hear of things.
* * *
Faith Wood had many traits that were admirable, but her resourcefulness never failed to impress her husband. As he sat on their couch playing with Liam, trying desperately to make up for screaming at him the night before, he watched as Faith, hands bandaged, was using every underworld connection she had to find out where exactly Angel was hiding himself.
Liam was in the middle of cocking his arm back, prepared to launch his Nerf football, when Faith shouted, “You know where everybody is, asshole! You can find anyone! How fucking rare is a vampire with a soul?!”
“Mommy said a bad word,” Liam informed his father, who struggled to catch the purple ball.
Robin winced at both his wife’s language and the way that apparently his son now knew which words were bad ones. “Buddy, why don’t you go get in your pajamas and I’ll be back in a minute to read your book, okay?”
Sticking out his lower lip, he began to whine, but Faith, who was angrily pacing with the portable phone, scooped him up, whispered something in his ear, and then set him back down. As he raced back the hall, Robin began, “Faith-“
“Yeah, I’m still here! Where would I go?” After a beat, she sighed in happiness, a smile stretching across her features. “You’re a prince, Richard. Just for this, I won’t kick your ass for jerking me around for the last hour.”
“Good news?” Robin interpreted, trying to keep his calm.
“Angel’s in Philly.”
“So he’s in Philly. How does that affect us?”
Blinking in surprise, Faith just said, “It’s Angel, Robin. I owed him my life before he saved me from those vamps last night. And…And I owe it to Buffy.”
“If memory serves, she told him to get away from her.” Getting to his feet, Robin began, “I know that you and Angel were friends, that you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him, and I appreciate him for that. And if you want to go see him to thank you or to invite him to dinner, hey, I’ll cook. But going to see him to try to play Chuck Woolery, that’s not cool.”
“You don’t get it. He and Buffy…I fucked with them a lot back in the day; I specialized in trying to break them up. And, yeah, we’re cool now, but I know that she’s still in love with him. Someone’s gotta do something, and those two are both way too stubborn to do it themselves.”
“I think that it’s a bad idea, but somehow, I don’t think that matters.”
Pressing a gentle kiss to his lips, she sighed against his mouth, “I love you, and I love that you’re going to let me take the car and not stress me over this.”
Robin kissed her, simultaneously loving and hating her sense of absoluteness, at the way that she refused to see any gray in situations but immediately broke things down to black and white. While he had learned in Sunnydale that sometimes there were more shades in the world than he could fathom, Faith, who had once refused to do anything but live in the gray, had become quite definite about right and wrong.
Two little arms were wrapped around their legs, and, as they looked down, Liam’s dark eyes stared up at them, Goodnight, Moon clutched in his hands. “Group hug.”
Faith smiled, kissed the top of his curly head, and gave Robin one final kiss. As the door to their house swung shut, Faith glimpsed the life she had built for herself, the life that she had never even fathomed. Her life wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Angel, and she’d be damned if she didn’t try to give him back even a fraction of the happiness that she lived with.
* * *
The Bronze was packed to capacity for the Spring Fling, and Angel felt incredibly out of place as he watched Buffy, beautiful in her wrinkled white gown and drying hair, push her way through the throng, Willow’s hand in her own so that she wouldn’t lose her, her laughter loud yet subtly fragile. The Master’s bite was covered by a gauze bandage that Giles had applied, and Angel was more than shocked at the way she had refused to go home but instead go to this dance despite the fact that she had actually died earlier tonight.
He wasn’t sure why he was still here. Xander certainly didn’t like his presence and made it known at every possible moment; Willow, while certainly not unkind, was unsure how to behave around him; and Angel felt powerfully out of place within this teen club. He did not even remember what it felt like to be this young and carefree, and he felt as if he was encroaching upon Buffy’s life.
Determined to leave her to her friends, he was preparing to melt into the shadows when a familiar, strong hand clamped onto his forearm, stilling his movement.
“Sneaking off?” Buffy asked, a knowing look filling her green eyes.
“I was just…It’s not…”
“Not really your scene?” she prompted.
Angel nodded. “I think I’m past my Spring Fling prime.”
Disappointment briefly flashing over her features, she echoed his nod, unconsciously hugging her body. “Yeah, I mean, vampires probably don’t go to lame high school dances. In fact, I don’t even know why I’m here. God, this place is terminally uncool, right? You should definitely go.”
Angel was used to the babbling; it was Buffy’s go-to response whenever she became agitated. But it was the way she seemed to be folding in on herself, the way her eyes were darting around the room as if she was assessing the threat level of Cordelia and her equally vapid posse. She was starting to break, the insanity of the night finally sinking in, and Angel wished that he could do something to make things better.
“Do you want to dance?” Angel asked instead, forgetting everything that he had previously thought.
Buffy nodded, gracious tears pricking at her eyes as she let him lead her to the floor. As Angel wrapped his arms around her, he felt the steady rhythm of her heart pounding against his chest, smelled the salt of her few tears, and he knew that he would do anything to protect this girl.
He loved her far too much to let something bad happen.
Angel was deeply slumbering on the couch, a small smile playing at his lips, and Lorne would’ve woken him if not for the fact that it was the first time he had seen his old friend smile in months.
LA had changed all of them, but perhaps it was Angel that had changed the most. The man that Lorne had known, the confused vampire that had sought refuge in LA and was desperately trying to muddle through the complexities of life, was no longer there; he had known that when he had asked him to kill Lindsay 5 years ago. But the collateral damage of taking on the Black Thorn had made him more cautious, even more reserved, and he had stopped trying to achieve any sort of happiness. Lorne couldn’t hate that man, but he did pity him.
The knock on the door was surprising considering that none of them had friends. Gunn tended to only venture out with Angel or Illyria just in case he ran into trouble, and Angel and Illyria certainly didn’t have friends. No, when Lorne opened the door to the house that wasn’t his, he was surprised someone was there, but he was not entirely shocked that it was Faith.
Closing the door so that she couldn’t enter, he quipped, “You’re not the Slayer that should be here.”
“Hey, Lorne. I need to talk to Angel.”
“He’s a little unconscious right now, muffin. Can I take a message?”
“I really need to talk to him.”
“About a certain fair-haired Slayer he ran into recently?” The green skinned demon smiled knowingly. “I think we should talk.”
* * *
The last thing that Buffy wanted to do was celebrate her birthday. After the past four days, the only thing that she really wanted to do was hang out with her friends in her house, gorging on heaping mounds of Chinese food and watching movies that Dawn would inevitably tease them all about, calling them old. In her fantasy birthday extravaganza, she would be wearing her absolutely ancient Sunnydale High gym shorts that had somehow ended up amongst the clothing she had fled town with, the shirt of her mother’s that she had kept because once it had smelled of her mother’s perfume, and her hair would all be atop her head, her face scrubbed clean of make-up.
In reality, Jon was taking her to dinner at some new chic restaurant in Philadelphia, followed by dancing at a club that Faith had recommended. Buffy had wanted to tell him no, but he was so excited and had put so much effort into the planning, even willing to go dancing despite the fact that his dance ability made Xander’s Snoopy Dance look like a Justin Timberlake video. If she bailed, she would permanently ruin her relationship with Jon, and, no matter how conflicted she was about Angel’s recent resurrection, she didn’t want to hurt him.
“Buffy, Jon’s here!” Giles called back the hall.
Struggling to get the strap of her heel around her ankle, Buffy shuffled over to the closet, desperately trying to find the jade necklace that Tara had bought her for her twenty-first birthday that would match the green band in her dress. As she reached for the box where she kept all of her jewelry, her hand bumped a shoebox atop the shelf, sending its contents scattering across the carpet. It wasn’t until she was already bending to pick things up that she realized it was her Angel box.
Inside the walls of the shoebox was every artifact from her and Angel’s relationship. There was the dried rose he had given her on their first date, the ticket stub from Banquet d’Amelia, a piece of the gown she had worn the Halloween that Ethan Rayne worked his magick; several sheets of paper, mostly notes that he would slip into her schoolbooks for her to find during the day, were all but falling apart in their old age, but there was one that remained almost as perfect as the day she had found it. It was Angelus’s drawing of her sleeping, the one he had left on her pillow only a few days before he had murdered Jenny Calendar. She still wasn’t sure why she kept it; maybe it was because he had always told her that he would draw her, but he had lost his soul before she had ever gotten the chance to pose for him. But whatever it was, Buffy felt herself tearing up as she stared at herself, barely seventeen-years-old, forever captured by her lover.
“Buffy!” Dawn squawked as she entered the room. “Jon’s waiting!”
Buffy quickly got to her feet, leaving the remnants of her past relationship on the plush carpet. Grabbing the necklace out of the box she had intended to grab, Buffy snapped, “I’m coming, Dawnie! Jesus!”
As she moved to walk past her little sister, Dawn caught her arm. Taller than Buffy, even when she was wearing spiked heels, Dawn met her gaze steadily, pressing a small box into her hand. “Happy birthday, Buffy.”
Buffy tiredly smiled, obediently lifting the lid to find a small, silver guardian angel pin nestled in cotton. As tears came unbidden to her eyes, Dawn self-consciously explained, “You gave that to me before the final fight in Sunnydale. You said that, if you didn’t make it back, that I’d need a guardian angel. I figured, with the way your birthdays usually go, you might need one.”
Wrapping her up in a hug, Buffy murmured, “Thank you.”
“Buffy, do try to be prompt! You’re going to miss your reservation!” Giles cried.
Setting Dawn’s gift on her dresser, Buffy made her way out into the living room, where Jon was patiently waiting in his coat and tie, his somewhat thinning blonde hair carefully combed in place. He smiled the moment she entered the room, affection shining in his eyes, and Buffy wished that she could summon up the enthusiasm for tonight that he seemed to have.
“You look lovely,” Jon drawled, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Don’t look a day over twenty.”
“That’s what every girl loves hear,” she attempted to joke, picking up the shawl that she had bought specifically for this dress, hoping her bad mood didn’t reflect in her voice.
“Well, you two have fun tonight,” Giles encouraged, sounding very much like the father he was to her, “and don’t drink too much. If you need anything-“
“Giles, I’m 28 today,” Buffy interrupted. “I think I can handle tonight.”
He smiled, realizing that he sounded like an old man. “Yes, well, do enjoy yourself. No unpleasantness tonight.”
Slightly stiffening at Giles’s not-so-subtle reference to the past few days, Jon simply agreed before leading her out to his car.
* * *
The restaurant was bathed in candlelight, music lightly filled the air from a string quartet, and no one in the restaurant seemed to be under the age of 40 except for Jon and Buffy. She felt woefully out of place, as if she was a child playing in her mother’s cocktail dress, but Jon moved with the ease he always did, ordering a bottle of expensive wine. As they made small talk and ate their extremely overpriced meals, Buffy felt her Slayer senses tugging at her body. There were no vampires in the restaurant, no demons visible, but her instincts were screaming at her that they were close by.
No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t shake it. When they walked down the sidewalk, Buffy began to scan the area, trying to find out where her feeling was coming from. The last thing she needed was to be jumped by a gang of vampires like Faith had been and have to reveal her secret identity to Jon. Just as she was about to scream from the agitation that was growing in her stomach, Jon gestured to the building they were standing in front of. A bright blue neon sign was glowing against the inky black sky, proudly announcing that this was Club Caritas.
As Jon handed the cover charge to the bouncer at the door, Buffy tried to remember where exactly she had heard the word before, how she knew it. It wasn’t until they were inside and Buffy saw the unique clientele that the memory bloomed full in her mind.
”A demon karaoke bar?” she had laughed as they sat on the hood of Angel’s car, gazing out at the ocean, trying to simulate regular conversation as if she hadn’t just been raised from the dead by her best friends.
Angel softly chuckled. “It’s bizarre, I know, but Caritas is actually one of the best allies I have.”
“Caritas?”
“It’s Latin for mercy.”
Once upon a time, Buffy had told Giles that she didn’t believe in leprechauns or coincidence. Giles had joked that, while he did not know of leprechauns, perhaps coincidence did exist.
If this was just a coincidence, Buffy would eat her purse.
“Faith didn’t tell me this was a costume bar,” Jon naively said as a red, horned demon passed them, raising his beer in greeting to a Polgara demon across the bar.
“No, I bet she didn’t,” Buffy agreed, seething with anger. She was going to kill her sister Slayer. Dismemberment would be a good start. Maybe some light torture before hand to make her suffer, but there would definitely be dismemberment. Maybe she’d just rent Hostel to get some ideas…
“Greetings and salutations!” a demon the color of split pea soup exclaimed, throwing open his arms which were draped in the ugliest purple suit Buffy had ever seen. “Welcome to Club Caritas, a sanctuary to all those who enter. I’m Lorne, proprietor, bartender, performer, and shoulder to cry on.”
Jon laughed at the picture this man presented. “Very nice to meet you. I’m Jon and this is my girlfriend Buffy.”
“Buffy,” Lorne repeated, taking her hand in his, pressing a kiss to it in old chivalrous fashion. “What an unusual name. Where does it come from?”
Buffy knew she was being baited, but, as always, she had never been able to resist like a grown-up would. “California. Sunnydale, specifically.”
“I’m a transplanted Angeleno myself. Us Californians should stick together, don’t you think?” Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, he said to Jon, “Do you mind if I borrow your girlfriend for a few moments, swap California stories?”
Jon wavered a bit as he said, “Well, it’s her birthday and we’re celebrating-“
“Why don’t you go to the bar and talk to Diego? Tell me that I’ve comped you for drinks all night. I’ll only have her a few minutes. You don’t mind, do you, Cupcake?”
Resisting the urge to smile, Buffy just agreed, “Not at all. Would you order me a Manhattan with two cherries?”
Jon agreed, disappearing into the crowd of humans and demons while Lorne led her towards the back room. The moment the door had shut, Buffy demanded, “What is going on?!”
“It’s very nice to meet you. You are quite the legend. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about the infamous Buffy Summers. I feel like I should do a sweeping bow or curtsy.”
“Who are you? How did my sister get an invitation to this place? Why would Faith recommend that my boyfriend bring me here? What is this, some massive conspiracy? Is Angel waiting in a closet to stomp on my heart to make this birthday complete?”
Picking up a framed photo that he had on his desk, he said, “I know that you’ll find this hard to believe, but Angel…He’s not real big on the whole doing what’s best for him thing. Sometimes, he needs a little push.”
“And you’re the guy behind him on the cliff?”
“In LA, when things got bad, he was just spilling out emotions, which, as I’m sure you know, is extremely rare. He was just screaming out all of these feelings-“
“Does this have a point?”
Glaring at her for daring to interrupt his monologue, Lorne snapped, “Patience! Anyway, the thing I kept getting the most was regret. Which, I know, a vampire with a soul full of regret is about as commonplace as Paris Hilton filled with an ugly Greek. But it was different. I think that of everything he regretted, you were what he regretted the most.”
It was as if he had thrust a blade through her heart. “Gee, you sure know how to make a girl want to slit her wrists.”
“He regrets leaving you, sweetbreads. And seeing you just brought all of that back. He loves you, Buffy. He misses you. And if those vibes you’re giving off are telling me anything, it’s that you feel the same way.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you think you know about my relationship with Angel, but you have no idea what it was like. He left me. He’d profess his love and then he’d leave. I buried my friends, lost my home, lost everything, and he didn’t even ask me to stay. Do you know what that’s like?”
Turning the picture frame around, Buffy saw that it was a picture taken at Christmas time. Angel was in the center with Cordelia, Wesley, Lorne, the man from the other night, and an unfamiliar woman all surrounding him, smiles galore as they stood in the lobby of a hotel.
“I have an idea.” Replacing the photo on his desk, he handed her a scrap of paper with an address written on it in bold hand. “In case you change your mind.” Brushing past her, he added, “Wouldn’t want to keep your boyfriend waiting.”
* * *
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jon pressed as he drove Buffy home. He had been hoping for a romantic interlude, but she had struck with a sudden headache at the strange club that Faith had referred them to.
“I’ll be fine. We’ll go out again and celebrate right, I promise.” Pressing a kiss to his cheek, she said, “Thank you for a nice birthday.”
“No problem. I love you.”
“I love you too,” she replied by rote, feeling hollow in her heart. From the moment that Lorne had given her that address, she felt as if it were burning a hole in her purse, and it was driving her crazy. She needed to get away from Jon, sort her head out, and figure out what she was going to do about Angel. You know, after she murdered Faith for setting her up.
Giles and Dawn were on the couch watching Monty Python, Dawn reciting along with the movie, and Buffy locked eyes with her Watcher. He said nothing, asked no questions, but Buffy felt as if he was demanding answers to questions that she wasn’t prepared to face.
“How was dinner?” Dawn queried, not taking her eyes off of the screen.
“It was fine.”
“I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Jon didn’t want to put out?” she teased.
Buffy just shook her head, heading to her room to change. The moment she crossed the threshold, she saw all of the things she had spilled on the floor, and she began to gather them, slowly replacing them in the box. She was halfway to placing it back on the shelf when she heard Giles say from the doorway, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see him.”
With a sigh, she took a seat on the bed, toeing off her shoes. “I want to be over him. I want to be normal. What I had with Angel wasn’t normal.”
“Buffy, one of your best friends is one of the world’s most powerful witches while the other was engaged to a vengeance demon. Your sister was once a mystical ball of energy, dozens of Slayers look to you as inspiration, and you can hunt and kill supernatural creatures. No matter how we dress things up, none of us are normal.”
“Jon’s normal.”
Unsure what to say, he simply agreed, “Yes.”
“You set me up with him because he was.”
“You needed normalcy.”
Realizing what he said, she asked, surprise evident in her voice, “Did you get me a rebound guy?”
Giles sniggered. “I’m not your…pimp, Buffy. I simply wanted to see you smile again.”
Unfastening her necklace, she admitted, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Go for a drive. See where it takes you.”
* * *
The house was big, set back from the road with large shrubs around it. There was something about it that reminded Buffy of the mansion on Crawford Street; maybe it was the way that it seemed to be shadowed despite the street lights or the sense of elegance that it implied. No matter what, it screamed “Angel’s house.”
For fifteen minutes she paced along the driveway, trying to determine whether or not she was going to actually ring the bell, before finally sucking it up and marching to the door, pressing the bell and then bracing herself.
A moment later, an extremely thin brunette that she recognized from Lorne’s picture answered the door, a small smile on her lips. Her accent was pure Texas as she said, “Hi, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Angel.”
“And you are?”
“I’m Buffy…Summers.”
“Oh.” To Buffy’s amazement, the beautiful girl’s appearance shimmered and then her skin and hair were streaked with blue, her clothing now a leather catsuit. “I am Illyria. Angel is upstairs. Please come in.”
Confused, Buffy followed, suddenly struck with an extreme sense of unease. Who was this girl? Why did she look like she had fallen into a vat of Slurpee mix? Who was she to Angel?
The man from the other night was sitting on the couch watching a basketball game, and, when he saw Illyria’s appearance and Buffy’s expression, he said, “Damn, girl! What did we tell you about dropping your look?”
“She is the Slayer. I cannot startle her.” With an indifferent shrug, she informed him, “She’d like to see Angel. I’ll get him.”
Buffy was still in shock as the woman departed, and Gunn chuckled as he said, “Don’t mind her. She’s not exactly acclimated to the world yet.” Slowly getting to his feet, he extended his hand. “We didn’t get to meet earlier. I’m Gunn.”
She shook the proffered hand. “Buffy.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve heard about you.”
“Apparently, everyone has.”
“Everyone?”
“I met Lorne earlier.”
Gunn nodded. “Yeah, the new Caritas opens tonight. We’re going but not till later. Angel’s not big on crowds, Illyria doesn’t understand human behavior, and the cane is shockingly not a chick magnet.”
“If you don’t mind me asking-“
Knowing the question, he cut in, “I got hurt in LA at the end, had a stroke. Like getting tackled on the one yard line, you know?”
Thinking of Anya, Buffy just nodded.
“I ain’t bitter though. Could’ve died, right?”
She felt him before he said a word. It had always been that way, that deep pull in the center of her being that let her know that Angel was in the area. When she was 16, it had caused butterflies to explode in her stomach; at 28, it made her wish she was 16 again when the world had been far less complicated.
“Buffy.”
“Angel.”
They stood there, five feet between them, five years separating them, and for the first time in her life, Buffy Summers was absolutely speechless.
When he took a tentative step towards her, the dam inside her broke, and she rushed him, throwing herself into his arms, face buried in his broad chest, inhaling the scent of him as her fingers curled into the soft fabric of his shirt. His hands were softly stroking her back as he pressed his lips against the crown of her head.
“You’re real,” she sighed, hot tears streaming down her face. “You’re real and you’re here.”
“Buffy-“
Not caring how pathetic she seemed, how needy she felt, she sobbed, “I missed you. I missed you so much, and I thought you were dead. I thought I’d never see you again.”
Pulling back, staring into her wet face, Angel realized that she wasn’t the girl he had known. She was an adult now, a woman, and age had only made her more beautiful. But as beautiful as she now, the vulnerability in her eyes was the same as it had been when Angelus had broken her heart at 17, when he had broken up with her in the sewer, when he had told her on the Day That Wasn’t that he had asked the Oracles to change things back.
“Please don’t cry,” he managed, using a thumb to wipe away a tear.
“Why? Why?” she kept repeating, wishing she could be more articulate.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt. I was scared that they’d come after you.”
“You should’ve told me! I have an army of Slayers! Who could’ve hurt me?”
“Buffy...”
“If you didn’t want me-“
As he pressed his lips against hers with a ferocity that belied his usually calm manner, Buffy couldn’t help but think about how he tasted exactly the same as he had that last night in Sunnydale, like coffee with a twinge of copper that he could never quite hide. She had never been able to drink coffee without thinking of his kisses.
When he pulled back, they gazed at each other for a moment before Angel whispered, “Happy birthday.”
Eleven years before, her entire life had changed when she had spent her birthday with Angel. The world had tilted on its axis and nothing had ever been the same. She had never been the same.
Tonight, the same thing was happening. As she stood in the circle of Angel’s arms, 11 years older and infinitely wiser, the world was tilting again.
This time, however, Buffy was not only prepared, she welcomed it. For the first time since Sunnydale, Buffy Summers felt as if she was alive again, as if that long dead part of her heart had suddenly burst back to life.
And as she raised herself up for another kiss, she just savored the moment because she knew that when she actually stopped to analyze everything, all of the impossibilities were going to be there, the curse was going to be there, her boyfriend was going to be there, but she didn’t care.
No, tonight was her birthday, and she was just going to savor her Angel. She’d worry about the rest tomorrow.
Tonight, she was going to celebrate all of the coincidences that had led them here, led her back to him. Tonight, she was going to be happy.