Spike continued to pace through his floating crypt. Occasionally he would look up with resolve, open the crypt door, fully intending to walk over the magma, and then realize how stupid that would be and resume pacing.
“All right, Spike. Get yourself out of this. You’ve been in worse. One more time. Yesterday, you went to the Bronze, left due to the noise, found an axe and went up to kill Angel…”
He stopped, both talking and pacing, as his brain slowly twitched into overdrive. There’s that sodding name again. I haven’t heard the name Angel for ages, yet he and the Slayer have been sharing a flat down at the graveyard for the past year. Why was the name Angel so unfamiliar? And I still don’t think it’s my style to kill the boyfriend. Gain no points with the Slayer, that’s for sure. You’d almost think it was…
He had it.
With no further ado, Spike stood up straight, money in pocket, and completely vanished from his crypt over lava.
***
“Screw this,” Faith said as she threw a book onto the table.
“Now, Faith, we mustn’t—“
“No, you know what, Rupert? I think we must,” Faith cut Giles off. “There’s nothing here. We ain’t going to find anything under ‘loud sleeping potions’ or ‘vamps who raise the dead for no obvious reason’ or ‘things that make Slayer powers disappear’. We’re at a dead end. Research isn’t going to do it. Kicking ass might,” she added as an afterthought.
Giles looked annoyed. “All right, Faith, where do you suggest we start? With the giant rabbit” (Anya squeaked) “that Buffy and Angel are fighting right now? Or how about with Spike, who’s currently boiling in some dimension of hell? We’ve got nothing on the ‘beat up someone and maybe they’ll talk’ front, either, so unless you come up with a proper course of action, you can resume research or we can tie you up again.”
Faith didn’t have time to answer; Jenny slapped a hand against the table. Everyone turned to the May-Have-Been-Dead-Yesterday Lady. “Something clicked,” she explained, “but then I lost it. Something I said earlier to Riley and Xander when they were at home… it was meant as a joke, but it wasn’t. I just totally lost it… damn,” she finished softly. Giles smiled and pulled her in so that her head lay on his shoulder.
“No matter,” he muttered. “We’ll get it.”
Faith had grudgingly picked up another book; Anya and Xander were both occasionally mystified by the floating books and the pages that kept turning of their own accord (that were actually being moved by each other), but they were helping. Willow and Oz were both completely engrossed in their books, as was Riley, and now as was Jenny, still resting her head on Giles’ shoulder. Sun was streaming freely in through the shattered window.
Despite the chaos at hand, Giles couldn’t help but think about what a lovely day this was.
***
Angel propped himself up on one shoulder as he woke up and just watched Buffy sleep. God, she was just the most gorgeous person he’d ever met in two hundred plus years of living. Her head sat lightly on the pillow, hair feathered out perfectly, small smile on her face.
Angel was the luckiest man on earth, in his opinion. And of the opinion of certain ex-government soldiers and ex-vicious vampires.
And today, she wasn’t even a Slayer. Buffy Summers was exactly who she’d always wanted to be; a normal girl with a normal boyfriend. Not exactly a normal life, but it was damn close to it. Maybe this was permanent. Angel became human because of a demon; maybe Buffy turned human because of a noise made by a demon. It could happen.
But he wasn’t good enough for her. She was this amazing person, strong on every level, Slayer or not. He never had been, never would be everything or anything, really, that Buffy deserved, whether she loved him or not. Angel ran a finger through Buffy’s hair.
And he made a decision.
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