Face to Face: Day 3 - Face to Face
by MattK
Angelus’s spell of pain lashed at the humans and demons of the resistance, but it struck hardest at the magic-users and the servants of the Powers. Riley carried a writhing Buffy while Gunn did the same for Faith, both forcing themselves to ignore both the bleeding slashes and whip marks that appeared on the (God, she’s so tiny) women they carried, and their own spasms of pain. Joyce supported Giles, while Wesley leaned on Lorne. Cordelia, screaming that she was blind again, oh, God, not again, oh, God, it hurt, was guided by Xander. Oz had staggered a few steps, trying to support both Tara and Willow, who were in a state of collapse almost as complete as the Slayers, before Anya arrived to take Willow. Perhaps he might have preferred the opposite, but he was stronger than Anya and Tara was bigger than Willow.

Spike was looking out for himself.

"Riley?" Buffy moaned as she stirred in Riley’s arms.

"I’m here, Buffy," He said.

"Where’s Angel?"

"He’s okay," he said. "He’s right behind us." In truth, he was too focused on carrying her and fighting the ripping pain in his gut to even notice where Angel was.

"No," she moaned, starting to struggle in his arms. "No, he’s not, he’s—Angel—" Her eyes flew open just in time to see Angel, gripping a spear made of silver fire, splash through the dripping blood and plunge into the wound in reality that Angelus had become. "Angel, no!" She screamed, thrashing violently in his arms as the flaming spear—now the only part of Angel visible—descended like a shooting star into Angelus’s impossible depths.

Riley couldn’t very well hold a struggling Slayer against her will, even if she was weak and injured. He gripped her tight to his chest anyway. "Buffy, stop!" he said. "You can’t go after him. He’s the only one who can do this!"

She might have kept struggling anyway, but a bolt of pain like a hot iron spike drove into her back, bending her entire body into a bowlike rictus of agony. When it passed, she was left limp and weeping in his arms.

It was about then that Riley noticed the ever-spreading pool of living blood was all but lapping at their heels. "Come on," he said. He staggered as pain bloomed in his right knee on his next step, but he gritted his teeth and kept walking and it was gone as abruptly as it had come. "Let’s make sure you’re still here for him when he gets back."

*

Angel was falling through the darkness. And the darkness was vast. It was an infinite abyss, a pit where he could fall forever without ever even seeing another creature, a void that could swallow worlds and be no closer to full.

And the darkness was cold. Cold as the darkness at the bottom of the deep sea trenches. Cold as the empty reaches of space. Angel could feel the cold settling into his bones, making them ache, feel old and brittle; could feel his stolen blood slowing and turning to sludge in his veins.

But worst of all, the darkness was alive. And the darkness was hungry. A human would have been devoured by the first touch of the darkness. Perhaps he would have been, too, his life or his soul or whatever it was that made him something other than a corpse drained away and made one with the darkness.

But the spear kept the darkness at bay.

*So you’ve come.*

The darkness was speaking. Unlike the awesome Voices of the other mighty supernatural beings he had encountered in the past few days, it was a familiar voice. It wasn’t even particularly loud. It was, of course, his own voice. But he couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from, or even if it was in his ears or in his mind.

"That’s right!" He answered, shouting back out into the darkness. "I’ve come to kill you!"

*I see. Prevent my dastardly plans. Avenge my victims. Kiss the girl and ride off into the sunset. Is that the plan here? And all you bring with you is that little toothpick? You’re really not very good at this, are you?*

Angel didn’t answer. It had been a mistake to speak before. He remembered being Angelus—the slightest chink in your armor, and he could psychologically gut you. Angel didn’t *have* any armor from Angelus.

*Aw, going all strong and silent on me? Give it up, Liam. Just let it go. It’s like the First Evil said: you’ve never been very good at anything but pain. So I’ll tell you what. You toss that little splinter over the side, and I’ll remake you. You’ll never be me again, of course, but you’ll be a hell of a lot better than you are now. If you want, I’ll turn Buff, too. Think about it. You, her, forever. You won’t even have to share. What do you think?*

"I think Belial was much better at temptation than you are," Angel answered absently. The light from the spear (*Why haven’t my hands burned to ashes by now? It hurts like hell, but…*) was shining *on* something. Some object floating in the dark, empty forever. If it was what he thought it was…

*Don’t test my patience, Liam. You know what happens to people who test my patience. Just let it go.*

"Why is it so important that I let it go? What are you afraid of?"

*I tried to do this the easy way.*

A punch flew in from the darkness, sending Angel spinning. A kick slammed into the small of his back, and it would have driven him to his knees if there were any ground to fall to in this place. Then they were all over him: hands, burning cold hands, punching, tearing, grasping. One grabbed his throat and another planted itself over his face, and if he were human he would have suffocated.

Then some of the hands started to tear at his fingers.

"*No*!" He shouted, thrusting the spear out like a quarterstaff. The silver fire blazed and he howled in agony as he felt the designs searing into his hands, but the fireburst drove the attacking shades back.

It also allowed him to see them.

"No. Oh, no."

*Yes. Oh, yes.*

All of his friends were arrayed before him. They had been Turned, and they were showing their demon-faces. Worse, it was immediately clear that they had been Turned by Angelus himself, as they were more completely demonic than the Master or Kakistos had ever become. Giles sported horns, while Joyce lashed a barbed tongue. Faith had huge, ripping claws. In fact, her fingers had lengthened and stiffened and grown a bony ridge on their undersides, so each finger had become a scythe-blade. Oz was in his man-wolf form, but he was clearly rabid now, dripping living foam from his jaws.

And Buffy stood at the head of them all, flapping a pair of batlike wings.

"Hello, lover," she said.

*I caught them not long after you came in here.*

Angel whipped around. The object that he’d spotted rose up out of the depths to hang in the emptiness before him. As he’d suspected, it was what remained of Angelus’s physical form. It was a hollow shell: the eyes and lower jaw were gone, as was the skull above the left eye. One leg was missing below the knee, and the other was missing its foot. One arm was missing its hand, the other just a finger. Bullet-holes and glass-slits littered the torso. And through all of these gaping wounds, Angel could see nothing but emptiness. As he watched, one of the remaining fingers crumbled and fell away into the abyss.

"You’re lying."

*Am I? Sorry to disrupt your comforting little fantasy, Liam, but they’re all right there in front of you.*

"How do I know they’re not just little pieces of you that you shaped to *look* like them?"

*What do you think a vampire *is*, Liam? I’m giving you one last chance: throw the spear away, join me, and you can live forever with them. Otherwise, you die here.*

Something had been wrong with this whole conversation, and Angel finally figured out what it was. "Why don’t you just take it away from me?" He asked.

*Excuse me?*

"You heard me. Back when I was you, I never made deals with my victims. I just took what I wanted. If this spear is such a problem for you, why don’t you just take it away from me?"

*Be careful, Liam. I may not be so generous as to kill you. Maybe I’ll destroy *them* instead. Spend forever with them, or spend forever without them. It’s your choice.*

"You can’t touch it, can you? You can’t even touch it." Then something else burst into his mind, full-grown and unquestionably correct. It came with the memory of the Scooby-things tearing at him, tearing at his hands and fingers, but *never touching the spear itself*. "And neither can they."

*SHUT UP!* Angelus screamed through both his own mouth and those of the Scooby Gang. *I’m done reasoning with you, Liam! No more chances! Now DROP THE SPEAR!*

"My name—" Angel drew back his arm. "—Is not—" sighted along its length as if he had all the time in the world, as if Angelus’s Scooby-horde wasn’t charging at his back. "—Liam!" and hurled the spear with all of his strength.

The Scooby-vampires fell into dust and dissipated into the darkness.

*Oh, God,* Angel thought. *If that was really you, Buffy, please forgive me. I’m so sorry, but I know you wouldn’t have wanted your body to be use the way he planned to use it.*

The shell of Angelus hung in the air, staring with empty eyes at the length of wood that had pierced its hollow chest. The spear’s flame had gone out, though the characters engraved in it still blazed with hot silver light.

"Please, God, don’t let me have guessed wrong," Angel prayed.

Then the spear’s light flared to sun-blinding brilliance, and Angelus threw his head back and screamed.

*

Outside, the wracking pain came to an abrupt end as Angelus’s voices stopped chanting and started to scream. The tentacles, which had been making teasing passes and no real effort to catch them, as they easily could have, suddenly began to whip and writhe like dying snakes.

Riley, his strength returned, began to carry Buffy away more quickly. In his arms, her eyes fluttered open. "Buffy?"

"He did it," She murmured. Then, as if realizing what she’d just said, her eyes lit up, and she looked up into his face with an expression of pure joy. "He did it!"

*

Angelus had never experienced such pain. He had been tortured by Holtz, but that was nothing. He had inflicted untold agony in the centuries he had existed, but if all of it was condensed into a single moment, it was *nothing*. He could feel the holy symbols and prayers burning into him, each letter, each symbol a branding iron in his guts.

Guts? Hadn’t he left his body, his vulnerability, behind?

Apparently not. Apparently no vampire, not even him, was safe from this.

He’d been mad, he knew. Insane with his vision. And he’d been a fool not to see the other side of that vision: if it was every vampire’s unknowing ambition to murder the Earth Mother, if every vampire was her enemy, then She was also theirs. Every stake, every spear, every piece of wood that sent a vampire to dust was Her self-defense, and Her vengeance on the demons that murdered Her children.

But he’d been stronger than that. What was this force, this power that was burning him away from the inside?

Then it came, and there was no more thought.

The Coming of the Light.

*

The mewling, writhing pool of living blood gave one last wail, then burst into flame.

*

Light exploded from Angelus’s eyes, the gaping cavity that had been his mouth, and his wounds. The light was blue-red-green it was white and it was colors that no eye had ever seen before. It was all colors and none and when it blazed up the screams doubled, trebled, and erupted from all corners of the Void.

Angel added his own cry of surprise and fear to the hell’s chorus of pain as the Light blasted him away from the Heart of the Darkness.

*

A shaft of white light punched through the surface of Angelus’s darkness, and Angel was thrown free. He hit the ground hard, skipped across the pavement like a stone two or three times, then rolled until he came to rest at the feet of the Scooby Gang.

Buffy, Wesley, Cordelia, and Faith’s faces quickly filled his blurring field of vision.

"My God!"

"Angel! Are you okay, honey?"

*Run,* Angel tried to say. *Run, get out of here, it’s not done, it’s still happening!* All he heard was some kind of rusty grating noise, but it seemed to have the intended effect: all four of them looked in what he assumed was Angelus’s direction, and started to move. He felt a strong arm slide under his back, and another under his legs.

"Are you sure it’s safe to move him? He could have brain damage."

"We don’t have much of a choice."

Angel felt himself rising up off the pavement, then the world blurred and went dark.

*

The pain had been had been unbelievable, fantastic, like nothing he’d ever imagined. But with the Coming of the Light something even worse had begun. Fourteen people had put a piece of their souls into the weapon, the bar of white light through his chest. And now those pieces flowed into him.

Angelus had never had a soul, something he’d always been proud of. Souls were a weakness, a sickness, the things that had Oz living in cages and Liam living in sewers. They were the things that took away the nerve to follow one’s true desires, they masked one’s true nature. Why, that pathetic, souled shadow of himself lacked the stomach to kill or torture even the most deserving, and he limited himself to drawings and poetry while denying himself the greatest art.

He’d never known.

He’d never *imagined*.

To have a soul is to be on a mainline to the reactor core of eternity. And now he had fourteen.

For the first time in his existence, he knew what it was to walk under the sunlight. To feel the warmth on his shoulders, to see the grass green beneath his bare feet, to feel the blades tickle at his toes.

He tasted chocolate in his mouth and knew it wasn’t some bonbon fed to him by Darla, but a birthday cake, baked by his mother.

He looked in the mirror and saw his own face—and was that a wrinkle? A gray hair? Were there more hairs than there should be in his comb?

He took a bite of a hot steak, finding it juicy and delicious.

Clear stars, glowing moon—the holy night that he blasphemed just by existing.

The sweet tang of a blackberry, plucked from a wild bush, made all the sweeter by the black juice staining his fingers and the briar-scratches on his hands.

Hot blacktop, then hot sand burning his feet, a plunge into cool water, then breaking the surface and filling his lungs with fresh, precious air.

Life. This was all life. Things that he had remembered from Liam, but had never experienced for himself—

Until now.

*Pain.*

Breaking his front tooth in his first bicycle crash.

He saw Willow (his girlfriend) and Xander (his boyfriend) making out. He/She had been coming to rescue them, and now this! Pain of betrayal, pain of an iron spike piercing through him, and pain—like taste—was so much sharper when he was alive.

A slap across his face from a man smelling of sweat and whiskey.

Falling down, skinning his knee while chasing after Xander and Jesse.

Finding an empty closet and an "I can’t stay" note on his daughter’s bed.

"I’m sorry, Riley. Forrest is dead."

Sharp, shattering pain, finding his lover dead in the bed that they’d shared.

Watching Buffy/himself vanish into the smoke, knowing that it’s necessary, but unable to bear it nonetheless.

Watching Alonna dissolve into dust.

Something terrible happening in the darkness, another man smelling of sweat and whiskey and something else "Now don’t tell anybody, this’ll be our little secret" and the terrible, burning *pain*.

*Fear*

Slow, grinding fear of waiting every day to find out if today is the day his beloved daughter will come home, or if a police officer will appear at the door and say "I’m so sorry, Ma’am."

Faith is going to kill Angel he’s so weak will I make it there in time?

Spike is coming back any minute—what’ll we do? (*What, me helpless before Spike? That’ll be the day*) Or worse, what if he just leaves us here? What if they never find us? Hold me…

The window was open last night, and Xander fell asleep. I might be a murderer.

They’ve come for me. Oh, Blessed Goddess, they’ve come for me. Donnie’s here, and they’re going to take me away. What if they reveal that I’m a demon? I can’t let that happen.

"The Master will Rise and the Slayer will die." No…

That huge dragon rising from the school, all these vampires—this is insane. Watcher training never prepared me for this. I *won’t* disgrace myself again, I *won’t*.

*Guilt*

Their tiny, pathetic, human sins and failings speckled and defaced his own titanic, monolithic evil.

"Kick his ass."

The cowardice that allowed him to poison the girl he loved like a daughter because he was "just following orders".

Every person that Angelus kills or hurts (*wait a second I’m Angelus...aren’t I?*) is my fault, because I can’t muster the guts to kill him.

Weakness, lust, cheating on Cordelia/Oz/Willow.

"I wanted a happy, normal daughter. Instead, I got a Slayer." Placing the torch to the books.

Stabbing Lester again and again and again and won’t the blood ever come off my hands?

The previously delightful sensation of feeling the stupid computer teacher’s vertebrae snap beneath his fingers.

*Happiness*

I’m not a demon! Ow, my nose hurts. But they were ready to fight for me even before that. A family—I’m part of *their* family now.

Alive? Oh, dear God she’s alive. I don’t know how they subverted the prophecy and I don’t care. She’s alive!

So this is what a peaceful picnic in the sunlight is like. I’d almost forgotten.

My boyfriend’s in the band!

Yes, I’d like some eggs, tea…a job. Thank you for taking me in. I won’t let you down.

What a beautiful apartment. I don’t think I would have turned it down even back when Daddy still had his money. I can’t believe it’s mine. Well, I guess I can, now. I’ve had to fight for it. Hello Phantom Dennis. Hello, me. Welcome back to your life.

Oh, Buffy, I love you so much…

*Love*

This is dangerous. This is stupid. He’s human. He’s male. That means he’s evil. I first came here to *punish* him. I’ve spent 1,200 years punishing men *like* him. Why does he have to be so kind and gentle and brave and funny? It makes it so I can’t get away from him. Besides, he has nice buttocks.

I’m sorry, Buffy, this is the *last* thing I want to do, but life with me is no life for you.

Wake up, Willow, please. You’ve always been there. What would I do without you?

Pain. Relax. Breathe. Pain! Press down. You’re doing wonderful honey. Shut up and just hold my hand, Hank. Pain. Press down again. Breathe! Push! Pain! Almost there, I can see the head. Just one more time push! PAIN! There now, Mrs. Summers, it’s a girl. Tiny person, warm and soft, put in his (?) arms. Wailing. Is she hungry? Oh, she’s so beautiful. Love of the husband who helped make this child, love of the tiny life in his arms. Of little Buffy.

No.

Forever. That’s the whole point.

No!

It was too much, too much! Too much love, too much pain, too much joy—desires, hopes, dreams, disappointments, sadness, anger and love co-existing.

NO!

Sex—making love, not just a gratifying grapple in the shadows. About pleasure or pain, yes, but also blood-deep intimacy, becoming one with—

NO!

Then fourteen voices in a chorus, saying to someone, sometimes each other, sometimes someone else: "I would die for you."

*NO!*

How could they stand this? It was unbearable, but this was their life every day, every minute, every heartbeat every breath of their mayfly, shooting-star lives. Feeling the time pass, feeling themselves die moment by moment, but even one of their tiny lives was too much for him to bear.

The Light blazed inside him, piercing into every last shadowed corner. The pain was burning him away, but he welcomed it. With this pain came death, and he welcomed death now.

*

Angel returned to consciousness with a snap, rather than the usual slow fade, and found himself staring into the grave face of an Asclepian demon.

An ordinary person might have been, to say the least, a bit put out to wake up and find a huge snake’s face in his own. Angel was more concerned to see that something nearby was giving off light bright enough to wash out the demon’s usually richly colorful scales.

"What’s happening?"

"No time for that!"

Two hands hooked under his arms and hauled him to his feet, and the next thing he knew, he was stumbling down an alley between Riley and Gunn as they dragged him along. "Buffy?" Was all he could manage to get out as he did so.

"She and Faith tried to carry your heavy ass, but we ended up with the honor," Gunn informed him.

"Yeah. They may be stronger than us, but there’s something to be said for having enough height to keep you off the ground," Riley said.

"Angelus?"

"Still dyin’," Gunn said.

*

The darkness, pierced in a score of places by beams of light, finally broke open and Angelus, his body restored to the image of Liam, rose up out of it. Impaled on a spike of light that sank deep into the Earth and pierced straight out to the heavens, light pouring from his eyes and his mouth, slowly rotating on his blazing axis, Angelus rose into the sky. Fifty feet. One hundred. More.

The light pulsed once, and Angelus was suddenly an indistinct shadow in the brilliant column.

Another pulse. Angelus vanished.

A third pulse and Angelus, encased in this terrible light, more merciless than the Sun itself, screamed for the last time.

The light exploded, filling the world with white, unflickering fire.


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