not everything is gonna be the way you think it ought to be;
I-- I had a secretary. And a liaison to... liaise and be more or less helpful when she wasn't trying to kill me. [ and gunn had his head cracked open with a law textbook or however that worked, but that was gunn's business, not angel's. gunn was still alive, hospitalized or not, and angel wasn't at liberty to share the other man's secrets. ]
It was sketchy -- deliberately so. It needed to be. I needed people to question, to buy into it, to wonder if I was really in this for the fight or in it for the benefits of being in league with the most powerful inter-dimensional force on the planet. Buffy questioning my motives, cutting ties and undermining my authority... I didn't like it, but it worked in my favor.
[ but buffy doesn't know. she knows something's up with him, that something happened that she's not going to like, but he hasn't told her. he needs to, and part of him wants to -- so many secrets, so many lies and games played; he's sick of them all -- but what they have is good. healthy. and it's working between them, for once. for the first time in a long time.
buffy took the news that he'd had a kid with darla well, but who was to say she'd be so understanding to this? ]
Mostly, if you count dragging all of Los Angeles with me to hell and back as on top -- and I'm not speaking figuratively.
Oh, and I've got a kid. [ because that's totally related to the conversation beyond his internal monologue. ]