Story Notes: Post-NFA. Buffy has a Slayer dream that sends her hurtling toward L.A. and Angel. Implied S/B, B/R and A/N. There are no happy endings here so read at your own peril.
A/N: This fic would not have happened, or it would have happened much later, if not for my good friend Ares. this is my first attempt at what I would consider a true B/A ficlet.Big, massive props need to go out to Ares for beta-ing this for everything but grammar- which neither of us is comfortable with. So, apologies to all for any grammatical errors, they are entirely mine. As is any just plain wrongness. Feedback is always appreciated.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Never gonna be mine. Not making a profit here either.
Buffy had known the moment the war had started. She'd become much better over the years at interpreting her Slayer dreams. By the time the calls had started coming in, she was already on the plane.
The flight from Rome to London to L.A. had given her both time to reflect and time to worry. She'd known he wouldn't have given up, wouldn't have switched sides, but she'd let Giles and Xander talk her around to their way of thinking. It had made cutting all ties to her life in America that much easier.
If she would've kept in contact, would he have shared his plans with her? Would she have found out sooner that Spike was still alive? Would they have asked for her help? Could she have prevented the whole thing? Would she be too late? All questions that ran incessantly through her mind while she tried to will the plane to fly faster.
It only got worse when the flight was diverted just minutes away from LAX.
She'd been in L.A. for a week before she found the building she'd seen in her dream. She stood on the sidewalk in the dim haze and, for a moment, considered turning and walking away. He'd never know she'd come and, if he survived on his own, she knew he'd never come looking for her. They didn't owe each other anything anymore.
In the end, there wasn't a conscious decision. There wasn't a moment when she just decided. Buffy blinked and suddenly she was through the broken doorway and running up the stairs.
Her brain sometimes took a little longer to catch up with her heart than the rest of her body did.
As soon as she stepped into the room, the smell hit her: charred skin, the acrid tang of burned leather, something sour that screamed sickness and death and turn around right now and run, don't walk.
She saw him lying on his side in a corner of the bare room and, if it hadn't been for the electric buzz that always signaled his presence, she wouldn't have known it was him, her Angel. There were bodies littered around him: countless rats, a bird or two, and what might once have been a cat. Buffy had known what to expect, she'd seen it all once already, but it was still a shock. Seeing him like that, so still and dirty and ravaged, surrounded by death.
"Angel?" She cleared her throat and tried again a little louder. "Angel, it's Buffy. Can you hear me?"
He didn't move, didn't even twitch. And he'd just been so twitchy before, right? The guy who could sit unmoving and brood for hours. She finally decided it would be easier to get done what needed to be done if he was completely unaware of her. She didn't think she could function if she had to move around while he watched her. She didn't know if she could go through with it if she had to speak to him.
She disposed of the bloated, decomposing bodies by scooping them up in a trash can and throwing them out the window. They made wet, bursting sounds when they hit the alley seven floors below. Like water balloons. She spent the next fifteen minutes on her knees huddled over the dingy toilet and trying not to touch the rim.
Buffy found a broom and clothing in one of the other abandoned apartments and dragged a mattress down the hall for him. She cleaned the studio apartment as best she could and it never once occurred to her to try and move him elsewhere. This was the place he had chosen, this was the place he would stay.
His clothing was in rags and his bloodied bare feet so naked against the cheap, imitation-wood floor. She sat down and lifted them onto her lap. There were bits of gravel and glass embedded in the skin, underneath the skin. His flesh had grown in around the debris and if he were human the infections they would've caused could have killed him. Throughout her ministrations-- stripping him, cleaning the worst of his wounds, cutting shrapnel and debris out of his flesh, applying the coven's poultice to the brand on his chest-- he neither moved nor made a sound.
He'd never reminded her so much of a dead body.
There were bodies in some of the apartments; the too old and too weak. Abandoned to die. Like him, like my Angel. She left them undisturbed and spray painted a green X on the doors. Green was the color of life and too cheerful a color for such grim work, but it was the only can of paint she'd been able to find.
She carried pieces of furniture-- a table, two chairs, and several end tables she decorated with candles-- into their apartment and then took a pillowcase to scrounge for canned goods. She picked up some cans of soup and cans of tuna, bottles of water and soda cans, a can opener, some spoons.
Why was there always at least one can of cranberry dressing and one of creamed corn in every pantry?
Occasionally, screams or primal roars filtered in from the outside and she would stop whatever she was doing to listen, but it all seemed far away from where they were. Their world was silence and candlelight and the scents of blood and death. Maybe she should have been more concerned for the helpless innocents still trapped in the city, but at the moment they were just abstract ideas while he was flesh and bone.
And he's mine.
Once she'd done everything else she could, once she could no longer put off the inevitable, Buffy pulled up the sleeves of her brown knit shirt and crawled onto the mattress next to him. He was a dead weight in her arms as she lifted him into her lap and Buffy was sweating by the time she got him situated to her liking. She brushed matted hair from his forehead and took a steadying breath.
The last time Buffy had done this she'd almost died.
The knife was sharp and she hardly felt the quick slice. Deep red blood welled up and she shoved her wrist between his lips. It's not working, why isn't it working, right before his face changed and a steel grip held her arm to his mouth. His tongue rasped against the wound, seeking more and more and still yet more. Her gasp was of not-quite pain and it made her breathing hitch and her arms tighten around him. She'd forgotten what feeding him was like. Forgotten why she'd only ever offered it once. It was the same feeling Riley had sought falsely time and time again; closer than sex and more intimate than any other experience she'd ever had save two.
I'm giving him life. He lives for me, because of me. And it was as true this time as it had been the last because, again, there was no one else.
In the end, she had to press her cross into his cheek to get him to release her arm and even then he never opened his eyes, just let her go and flinched back. She wobbled, trying to stand on boneless legs, and wound up having to crawl across the floor, trailing crimson, to get to her supplies.
Should have thought about this before I opened a freakin' vein.
She pressed strips of cloth to her wrist and watched them soak through, staring fascinated at the patterns made on the white cloth by her spreading blood. Her clumsy fingers finally got the dressing tied off just before everything swirled from gray to black.
When Buffy woke, the sun was peeking through the gap in the curtains to wash the room in a blaze of angry red and orange as it neared the horizon. She'd been unconscious all day. She lay on the floor, feeling the sticky-cool film of sweat on her back and across her face. Every beat of her heart tugged at the burning in her wrist.
It's not too late. Yet. Get up and get out, get out now!
Buffy counted the cracks in the ceiling. She made it all the way to thirty before she turned her gaze to the mattress. He was huddled as far into the corner as he could get without merging into the walls.
She crawled to him and listened closely to the mumbled, half-spoken words that streamed from his cracked lips. His eyes moved restlessly under paper-thin, bruised lids. Buffy didn't bother to reassure him. He wouldn't hear her anyway.
She could have told him that his team was beyond caring about past slights or bruised feelings. Whatever had gone on in the past didn't matter now and Buffy knew with certainty that Spike, at least, had gone out the second time just as he'd gone out the first; laughing all the way and taking as many of the other side with him as he could.
Even now, weeks after, her left hand sometimes still tingled with the remembered fire of his soul. She laughed softly as recalled the faces of the people in the airport parking lot when her hand had suddenly burst into flame and all she'd done was smile sadly. The connection had still been there and she had lived those last minutes with him; feeling the fierce joy in his soul as he'd gone down for the final time.
Once she'd cleaned up and eaten, she loaded up with weapons and went out hunting. The sun was long gone from the sky and demons boldly roamed the streets. She kept to the shadows and only killed when she had to. There were too many to risk her being caught and mobbed. She was still too weak.
Buffy walked for two hours before she stumbled upon a butcher shop. The power had been off for too long and the smell carried for blocks. She knew before she went in that nothing was salvageable but she had to check. The only other option was to feed him herself and she couldn't do that again.
The floor of the butcher shop was a seething mass of fur that flowed in and out of the shattered windows and broken door. Starving, nearly feral dogs worried at scraps of rotting meat and snapped at anything that came too close. The high-pitched squeak, squeak, squeaking of rats grated in her ears and raised goosebumps on her arms.
Buffy opened her backpack and pulled the pillowcase out, never taking her eyes off the teeming sea of animals.
Dinner is served.
Day passed into night passed into day. Every day was spent sleeping on the floor next to his bed and every night spent hunting for him and feeding him. And still he didn't wake. And still his whispered confessions continued.
One week turned into two and soon there were familiar half-seen shapes flitting through the night. Buffy sat on the windowsill and watched as well-known forms glided silently through the streets. Occasionally, one would turn her face up to the moonlight and stare hard at the apartment building before tipping her head and turning to melt back into the shadows.
The experience would do them good; forge them into steel by the fires of Hell itself.
The sound of movement pulled her back from her nightly vigil and she turned to find him staring at her in confusion before his eyes rolled back and his lids closed again. She climbed into bed with him, as she hadn't dared to do before, and held him close as he slept. He would never know how she traced the new lines on his face in wonder and ran her fingers through the streaks of gray at his temples.
Centuries in a hell dimension had not left a mark on him, but the brand of the Black Thorn had added decades in little more than a month.
The military was eventually able to establish a toehold and expand throughout the city. Relief workers moved cautiously into the streets, giving aid to any survivors they could find. They never knew how their efforts were bolstered and strengthened. If they heard tales of daring rescue from impossible monsters by mysterious men and women, they only wondered at how, when things were at their worst, Man could sometimes rise to the occasion. And wasn't it amazing what fantastic things a mind under stress could imagine?
When the first soldier knocked on the door of their apartment, Buffy had already carried him into the sewer tunnels. She waited for two days, until she knew they wouldn't be coming back, before moving him back into the apartment. It was all but over now and the only thing left to do was make the call.
She waited three more days, stretching her time with him as long as possible. Willow would know she was still alive and keep Xander, Faith, or Giles from charging in unneeded and unwanted. It was amazing she'd managed to hold them off this long.
When it seemed like he was finally coming back to her, when it seemed he would open his eyes and finally see her, Buffy took the cell phone from her pack and called. She asked all the pertinent questions and made all the appropriate responses then drank him in and waited while Willow found the number for her. Buffy called it immediately, never giving herself time to change her mind.
Nina answered on the first ring and said she could be there by the next night.
For the last time, Buffy slept with him wrapped in her arms.
The next evening, when Nina called to say she was in the city, Buffy put the last of the coven's medicine on the fading mark on his chest and fed him for the last time. She shivered when his arms unconsciously tightened around her, holding her while he drank. This time, he let her slip out of his embrace without protest and even smiled in his sleep.
Her name was the last whispered word on his lips as she picked up her things and left the apartment. She slid down the wall in the hallway and sat beside the closed door, dry-eyed and waiting for the woman who had braved the ruined city to come for him.
Italy was wine country. There were abboccatos, passitos, cannellinos, reds, pinks, whites, and a myriad of other colors and types to choose from. You couldn't live in Rome and not drink, at the very least, one glass with dinner.
Buffy favored the dark reds. Dawn told her once that it was like having bottles of blood in the fridge again. Buffy had nodded, made her 'ewww' face, and kept filling the shelves with bottles of what could almost be life.
She would stand at her bedroom window and hold her glass up to the moonlight to watch the small eddies of liquid swirl and dance. The thick, copper penny smell was only a product of her imagination but she wouldn't drink until she'd captured that scent, until the wine had turned to blood. It was a nightly ritual that she never allowed herself to examine too closely.
When she first returned to her life in Rome, her lover had asked her, "It is done, bellissima mia?"
She had stood in the safety of his arms and told him the first lie she'd ever needed to give him. "It's done."
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only.
--Excerpt of sonnet XIV from Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning