who. buffy and angel what. a continuation of the last thread when. an hour after the angel post locked to. no one status. complete
Buffy: An hour had passed since their talk on the balcony. Somehow, she'd convinced Angel to try and get some more rest, as if either of them believed such a thing would be possible. When he'd reluctantly agreed to at least lie down, Buffy had moved back into the livingroom, resuming her position in the chair. A promise had been made that she wouldn't leave, and at least for now, she had every intention of keeping that promise. Eyelids had just begun to grow heavy, the promise of sleep just moments away when movement caught her attention and she was jumping out of the chair like a startled feline. Once attention focused on the broad figure that stood in the doorway to the bedroom, she felt muscles relax at once while a breath of relief loosened the sudden knot in her throat. "Sorry," For over a month, she'd been on high alert constantly, always prepared to come face to face with the monster who wore Angel's face or the Slayer turned demon. "Old habits, right?" Shrugging, Buffy folded her arms, rubbing at the flesh there as if she were cold. "Get any more rest?" The answer to that question was one she knew before she'd even asked. Of course he hadn't. A single step was taken towards the vampire, but that was it. The sudden thought that she might be smothering him entered her mind, but it was quickly shoved aside. No one could blame her. When the silence pressed down too heavily, Buffy found she couldn't contain the question that surfaced. "Do you remember everything?" To pray that he didn't seemed like a futile thing to do, since prayers had gone entirely unanswered for so long. It didn't seem fair that Angel had to remember the things Angelus had done, considering he hadn't been in the driver's seat. Then again, fair wasn't a term that was in anyone's vocabulary as of late.
Angel: Sad, that people were only the sum of their memories and he no different than the rest. That everything came down to fragmented moments, held together by the unsteady glue of time. The twilight enwrapped him, cold and desolate - not harshly so, but neutrally chilly, like a blanket over a slowly cooling corpse by the time he'd dredged up the effort it took to make himself known in the living room. Only an arm's length between them, now, and Angel could just make out of the shape of her expression in the wan half-light. So long since they'd touched one another. The ache he felt was boundless, a compelling urge to close the distance, to bury his face against the warm skin at Buffy's throat. It was a subtle new variation on hell, but not totally unexpected. Angel's face twitched at her query, a wound that wouldn't seal over, and underneath, muscles taut with grief and some vague unrealized fear. Only the truth came to his lips, however, simple and unvarnished. "No . . not yet," he said hoarsely. Not everything, but more than enough. And then with that relentless courage that was his alone, he confessed, "But I'm afraid of what'll happen when I do." He really hadn't thought about it, but that'd been a conscious effort on his part, things he hadn't permitted himself to know. Nonetheless, those thoughts rested uneasily in the back of his mind, crouched down and waiting for the wind to change. And pretty soon, the vague, uneasy rumbling of hopelessness would come crashing back in on him in gray tinted waves of depression. He dwelled in those cracks between sacred spaces and illusory states of grace and this was what Angel understood that Buffy could not. This was his territory: marginalized by consequences thrust upon him rather than chosen, swimming hard in the riptides and pretending he could deal. Resisting for resistance’s sake. Ultimately, he knew he was fighting the law of diminishing returns, the law that said no matter what he did, eventually, he would be waging a losing battle where his efforts fell short of his deepest wishes. "I don't know if you should be here, Buffy." It came out breathless - and not at all in the derisive tone he meant it to. "But I'm glad you stayed." All he wished for now was to keep Buffy safe and alive and to escape the hellacious smell of deterioration, of sulfur; a perfectly respectable nadir of misery. Emotionally, the same strings started to stretch, started to stretch, started to heal. He was desperately grasping at strands of recollection, but they seemed keener on drowning under a tide of nausea and a slow-building anxiety. On an objective scale of vulnerability, he was about as helpless as it got.
Buffy: It was a blessing that Angel didn't remember everything. Maybe he'd get really lucky and it would stay that way. She wished she were that lucky. "But I'm afraid of what'll happen when I do." The overwhelming urge to reach out and comfort him was nearly enough to propel her forwards. Instead, she simply shook her head. "You just have to remember that it wasn't you. I know that. Everyone knows that, Angel. It's just you that forgets." A gentle attempt at a reassuring smile forced a single corner of her lips upwards. When he said she shouldn't be there, Buffy only shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe not, but I'm not leaving." Attention turned from Angel for a moment, focusing on the skyline of the city past the balcony. It would be dawn soon. Already, the building were outlined with a line of dusky rose. It seemed too majestic to be the city where Buffy had witnessed so much ugliness. The blinds were pulled, so that Angel wouldn't meet a dusty end in the half hour it would take for the sun to rise. When that was done, she moved to the couch, and sat down. The way her shoulders fell and her body sunk back into the cushions was a testament to the ever growing exhaustion. Buffy'd started to wonder if it would ever go away. Heels of her palms dug into her eyes in hopes of wiping the soreness there away, and failing miserable. "I know this is probably not what you want to hear right now, Angel -- but we need to talk about what we're going to do with Justice." Instincts said hurtkillhurt, but Buffy knew it would take more than sheer enthusiasm to bring her down. The Slayer-turned-demon was stronger than both of them. Probably even both of them put together. If they charged in there without thinking, they'd get killed. Or worse. Buffy almost didn't care. She wanted to just run in with fists flying. Most of all, she wanted to see Justice hurt. And that frightened Buffy. In her years as Slayer, she'd hurt a lot of demons. Never had she enjoyed it. "We both tried to save her, Angel." And they had. What had it gotten them? All she could think of was grief.
Angel: That brooding profile, still set so fiercely against the tears he could no longer shed, forbade Angel utterly from crossing the invisible gap that divided them - a clearly delineated no-man's-land staked out and guarded without ever acknowledging it aloud. Something just as important and domineering as a landmass, like his willpower, which was what most people mistook as strength, but it wasn't the same. Being stubborn and being strong were not the same. Feeling an aching heaviness, he shuffled in turn and moved toward the loosely draped windowsill, brow furrowed in thought. Even the light from the threatening dawn seemed muted, giving the cityscape a misty, dreamy look. Like the world around him was resting, hibernating beneath the excuse of Hell. Balanced on a knife, the world began to tremble because everything was wrong. Angel wanted to laugh - or maybe that wasn't suppressed laughter making his throat hurt. He felt the core of his resentment melt away and could no longer pretend that it was only anger he felt, could no longer avoid facing why the question - the one he'd known she was going to ask, had every right to ask - had galled him so, why it hurt so much to know Buffy suffered because of him. Because of Justice and, in retrospect, their beautifully grotesque semblance of misguided love. Angel looked up, the intensity of her gaze thrumming through him like a live current. For a long moment he didn't answer, his expression painfully open; he looked at Buffy as if really seeing her for the first time. "What I . . did to you," He swallowed, hard. "I can't get that first night out of my head." The lines of his face shifted into something entirely different, something too much like naked honesty for comfort. And the blunt courage of that admission felt like a blow. When he thought about it - and he did think about it, because that was really all he had - he always thought about it in terms of personal failure; private, claustrophobic interviews in dark spaces, harsh cut-downs that never let Angel forget that he was the inhuman, separate, the weaker. Seeing them together now, their sameness, he thought he understood then, the realization he'd been moving toward all this time, the final flowering growth of that very old seed. "I'm a dead thing, Buffy. I'm an abomination, an affront to the living. Nothing good can come from me trying to be a man because in the end - I'm a demon." A burning sense of low-grade panic welled up in his chest - the inner directive to find the answers, solve the problem, to make things right. Unlike other nightmares which always faded into jumbled unpleasantness upon waking, every detail of this one was preserved crystal clear. "I'm going to find Justice." Angel turned, avoiding her gaze. "I'm going to find her by myself." Because she was already gone forever, a reluctant casualty in Angel’s war. A willing lover when no one was looking. A heart that never gave up and Angel knew that Justice had died saying his name. "And I'm going to kill her. Don't make this harder than it already is, Buffy."
Buffy: In the time it took Angel to speak, Buffy thought she might choke on the silence, or that she'd drown in it. One or the other. She didn't want to bring it up. God, all she wanted to do was cling to Angel, if only to make sure he was really there. Days upon days had been spent thinking he'd never come back, that he'd spend an eternity in hell. "What I . . did to you, I can't get that first night out of my head." Finally, viridian eyes rose to meet his own much darker ones. It was pointless to tell him not to blame himself, because he'd do it anyway. "You have to." Blunt, but honest. She rose, the simple movement feeling as if she were lifting a ton with her, before crossing to where Angel stood until the distance between them was closed. He was speaking again, telling her things she'd heard from him time and time again. "Yeah, you're a demon. You're a dead thing. But you're forgetting something, Angel. And I don't know how many times I'm going to have to pound this into your brain," Gently, as if afraid she'd shatter him into a million shards with the slightest pressure, her palm rested against the slope of his cheek. "You have a good heart. And don't tell me it's not beating because I know that. I know you're dead, I know you're a demon -- but I also know you're good. I've seen the best and worst in you, and I'm here to tell you that the best? It outshines the worst any day of the week." It didn't take long for Angel to turn so that he didn't have to look her in the eyes, and her hand dropped limply to her side. Surprise clouded concerned features when he said he was going to kill Justice, but that same surprise turned into something akin to anger. "No, see -- that's where you're wrong. I'm going to go with you, and there's absolutely nothing you can say to change my mind. Nothing." If Angel thought for a single second that he'd be able to go this alone, he was gravely mistaken. "Look, I don't want to argue with you. I just got you back. I just need you to accept this for what it is. I'm going with you. Whatever you decide to do, we're doing it together."
Angel: Sometimes he thought Immortality was a curse, singling out the truly damned and enabling them to suffer many more than the normally allotted number of annoyances. Even if Angel was mildly accustomed to living in the serpentine canyons of his splintered identity. Then, of course, there were days like this, when he knew it was much more personal. Everything seemed to have slowed down - he drew in breath forever while the rest of him was still held immobile, pain and loathing building in his stomach like bile as he had all the time in the world to remember the irrational dread he'd felt before Justice had condemned him to hell. There was a moment where he just couldn't think, couldn't comprehend - their connection clicked into full duplex, and he rode it eagerly: Buffy's touch passed fire back through his skin, the shock overriding his senses. Angel wanted it all, the shock the pain the heat the betrayal, and he wouldn't, couldn't, settle for less. Hope, held in abeyance for so long, bloomed warm and heady in his chest. He collected those kindnesses, those moments of human weakness, human tenderness and held them close, living in the faith that somewhere, in all the great wide world, he would someday find the means to return them again. Something about that unguarded feeling sparked an answer in Angel he wasn't sure he wanted to control. They were standing too close for comfort, for his sanity, and the scent of Buffy's body made him remember why it'd been so hard to stay away from her before. Angel glanced down at her terrible insistence, then away, mouth tightening fractionally. Anger darkened his expression for a moment, but he controlled it. "You shouldn't be here," he said, and started walking down the hallway as if her reassurances had fallen on deaf ears. That fucking imagination of his began supplying him with a number of possibilities, all of them unpleasant, if Buffy and Justice confronted one another. Didn't even need preternatural senses to figure out how that one would go. Flash images played through his thoughts. One of the women he loved had betrayed him in ways that defied logic - in ways that made him question why he could have ever loved her. So complacent, he'd been, letting himself believe that things could be simple between them . . Part of him, the mechanism of conscience, knew these thoughts to be dangerous; the rest of him, simmering with unspent rage, still wanted her to pay and pay hard. Even if he was unsure about the killing blow. Chagrined, fighting more torrents of emotional discord than he knew what to do with, he flung open his closet and pulled the first sweater he found over his tank top. Dying would have been so much easier than this, he thought.
Buffy: When he turned away, it hurt worse than any physical blow he could have laid upon her. Something terrible clicked inside of Buffy, and she wanted to simply fall to the floor and not get back up. While the urge to do so was pretty fucking prevalent, she followed him desperately into his room, watching as he pulled the sweater on. "Angel, please," She felt her voice crack, felt something tremble violently before realizing it was her own traitorous body. "Don't leave." Whatever strength, whatever shred of resolve was slipping through her fingers and she could feel it disappear. "If you knew what I went through to get you here," There was no elaboration, because Buffy knew that would be an argument unto its own. "If you knew how much I've missed you since you went away .." Even if she'd tried, there would be no holding back the tear that made its way down the path of her cheek. "Every single day that you were gone, I felt like I couldn't breathe. I fought every single day for you, and God, I'm so tired. Angel, I'm exhausted. I don't want to have to fight for you when you're standing right there." A beat, as she finally wiped away the damp trails of salt on her face. "Just .. don't leave. Not tonight. Please."
Angel: Angel closed his eyes and enjoyed the fuzzy sensation at the edges, allowing himself to drift away for an undeterminable stretch of time, until tiny but vastly irritating spikes of conscience started digging into him, nagging with a persistence that seemed insurmountable. He kept still - practically corpse-like - fighting to keep his breathing under strict control. Buffy was little more than a shadowed gleam of rose in the darkness, outlined in faint relief - looking altogether very cross and more than a touch betrayed; always and ever a ruling influence in his blood. Angel had to get very close to see the spark of resolve in the wide, tear-misted eyes. He didn't mind. He'd felt it from across the room. "Buffy--" Every nerve in Angel's body came awake in the space of one attenuated heartbeat that wasn't his own. Desire he'd kept on hold for too long ignited in a flash-fire of urgency, making him grasp for something to balance himself; his hand was drawing smoothly up and down her back, coaxing her deeper into the haze of contentment, feeling her slipping frame and seductive heat beneath the thin fabric. "The only thing that kept me going was the hope that I might see you again." Human nature, the great equalizer. Because as it turned out, it didn't matter how long you'd been around, or how much experience you thought you had - the human heart had its own rules. He'd proven it yet again. In spite of ample opportunities for damage control and against every voice of sense he (no longer) possessed. But none of those almost-truths quite covered what had happened tonight, did they? That stark reminder of just how quickly Buffy could get under his skin, just how well-equipped they were to hurt one another. She was a walking nerve tonight, vulnerable, grieving, thin-skinned and exposed; Angel should have known better, kept it together better. Should have seen how much pain Buffy was in and made allowances. What terrified him, he admitted now, alone in his head for the first time in ages and entirely too sober for such admissions, was how profoundly that uncomplicated longing spoke to him. How deeply it touched him, and how much he wanted to just reach out to it, never mind the obsequiousness or the risks. Can anyone live for nearly three hundred years and say they did nothing? Risked nothing? Merely stayed alive? It'd be pointless. Somewhere he remembered that he knew the answer to that, but it felt far away now, inconsequential. At last something eased a little in the set of Angel's shoulders. God, he wanted to be happy - wanted so badly to feel that infinitesimal iota of comfort and disappear into the aether, even if he was oblivious that his soul had been bartered and bought. Pair for in full. Thrust out of one hell only to land in another. What seemed impossible before was surprisingly easy now, and he found himself touching the warm column of Buffy's throat, slipping his fingers into the thick softness of her hair. Angel held onto the moment, stretched between unbearable warmth and a chill that sent delicate shivers through his skin; listened to the steady repetition of pulse. "I missed you," he whispered into the curve of the nearest ear, brushed his mouth across her cheek, "more than I can say." Practically nuzzled his face upon her own. "I'm not going anywhere if you don't want me to . . It just . . hurts."
Buffy: They should have never came to Cleveland. If they hadn't, none of this would have ever happened. It was too late for 'should have's and what if's', though. None of them mattered. Buffy had learned that simple truth a long time ago. It shouldn't have been this way, but it was. The darkness in the bedroom suddenly was too thick, too heavy to be only darkness. No, it was clouded with unspoken words and two pained hearts, only one of which was beating at all. He finally broke the silence with her name. She hated what a simple word could do to her when it came from Angel's mouth. There were a lot of things she hated, really. Unfortunately, Angel wasn't one of them. It would have been easier if she could. That was another fact she'd learned too early. Even after all these years, it was something she found impossible. Hating Angel was as impossible as mixing oil and water. There'd been times, recently at that, that Buffy could almost pretend to hate him. But all it would take was a glance, a touch as simple as the one that cool fingers traced at her back, to send her back into reality. Breath hitched and shuddered when familiar fingers danced along the spanse of her neck. She had to remind herself that he was really in front of her. This wasn't another dream. God knows she'd had enough of them. "I missed you," Cheek to cheek, heart to heart, it was impossible not to cling to the moment. "I'm not going anywhere if you don't want me to . . It just . . hurts." A nod of understanding was given before her caught breath finally was released in a heavy sigh. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again, Angel. Every time something bad would happen, my first instinct was to run to you." But then it had been a monster wearing his face that had caused the bad things. Even Buffy had to take a step back and gawk at how terrible things had gotten, and how quickly. "I'm sorry," Before he could ask why, she continued. "I'm sorry I couldn't get you out sooner. I know that it felt like years to you. I tried every day to get you back. Everyone did." Dark lashes fell closed, coming to rest at the high arch of cheeks just before she let her forehead come to rest on his shoulder, marveling at the solidity there. "I'm so sorry." For everything.
Angel: Angel's face flickered with something that might have been sadness, but it was gone too fast to tell. Examining his own motivations with the most brutal honesty he could muster, he found that everything else came second to the profound wish he felt, that Buffy could find some measure of peace with him, some release for the tightly held knot of grief she was guarding so carefully within herself. Angel knew that feeling too well. How you tried your best to keep still, hold so tightly to the anger and pain, keeping it close instead of letting it move through you, as if to let it go was to let their love go. It made Angel's blood stir in ways that burned away his will to fight it. He tried to shy away from the hope, from naming what he wanted, but the ache of wanting it was shamefully sweet and ran through every part of him like bright veins of ore in bedrock, so deeply tangled with everything he was, he didn't think it could ever be unraveled. In truth, none of that really mattered. Not anymore. He couldn't have what he wanted because he wasn't willing to give what it would take - what he thought it would take - it was as simple as that. It had been so hard to trust himself again, to put himself into Buffy's hands, even for such a short time . . it had taken all of his courage just for that. With someone else, it might have been enough, but Buffy's honesty - her generous heart, freely given, and the trust inherent in that gift - had swept aside his reluctance like one sweet, destroying kiss. The price? Not much, only everything. But Angel didn't know how to deal any longer - didn't even know how to want it. And even if he did know, how could Buffy possibly want anything to do with him, after every thing that happened? If she knew what Angel had been? It was hopeless. "Don't say that. You don't have anything to be sorry for." Something in the proprietary tone, her warm, pressing weight. The feeling came again, strong and overwhelming, that spiraling, falling feeling Angel needed so badly - the one that let him be lost, let him forget what they were and all the reasons why he didn't deserve to even be touching her. That steady, unblinking regard, that nonplused expression before her head laid against his shoulder, unnerved him. "It wasn't your fault, Buffy. It never was." Drawing a mournful sigh, he briefly closed his eyes, dark crescents against alabaster skin. His hand continued to move up and down her back, cupped loosely against the heated hollow. Something ached in the vampire, the pain more immediate than he'd guessed it would be - leaving behind a memory of want so vast and terrible that he thought he might begin to weep with the grievous weight of it all.