I woke up surrounded by white fluffiness. For a moment I consider that perhaps I was back up in heaven, but the realization kicks in that this whiteness doesn’t seem very cloud-like; actually, it seems rather pillow and sheet like. Attempting to shift myself on the bed to take in my surroundings, a sudden pain shoots through my stomach and a small yelp elicits from my mouth. Looking down, I see that while I may still have on the pants I was wearing earlier in the day, I’m now wearing an extremely large black T-shirt. Pulling up at the hem, I look at the right side of my abdomen, covered in a slightly blood soaked bandage, but cleaned with care and precision, and smile. Angel.
The sudden smell of something burning followed by an extremely large bang draws me out of my thoughts and I gingerly lower myself from the bed and begin making my way toward the noise. As I walk I can’t help but take in my surroundings and I realize that this is not the apartment I had originally come to L.A. to find him in. The building I am in more closely resembles a house and is anything but small; decorated with elaborate detail and design. Walking around to the right I find myself confronted with a sight I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest of dreams. My poor Angel, apparently attempting to cook some sort of sustenance, is standing in the middle of a very losing battle with his kitchen. Off to the right of the counter is a pot of rice, spilled on the floor, and I’m assuming the source of the loud bang I heard earlier. The oven door is open and billowing out black smoke like some sort of newly awoken dragon whose fire isn’t quite as effective as it used to be.
Angel himself is doing some sort of ceremonial food cooking dance behind the large island cupboard while attempt to pull the burnt meat type substance out of the oven; I’m assuming the cause of all the smoke. Walking around the side of the island, unnoticed thanks to my Slayer stealthiness, I find that the cause of the dance is the hot water streaming out of the spilled pot of rice. The second the meat hits the countertop he jumps out of the scalding water and, unknowingly, directly into me. Luckily we both have amazing agility, however, and we both manage to stay standing. Looking at me sheepishly, Angel glances back at the disaster of a kitchen and then back to me once again. “I’ve recently discovered that I really like food and figured that you probably do too. Problem is, I don’t know how to cook any of it. I usually go out and bring food back in, but since you were here and injured, I didn’t want to leave. I figured it couldn’t be that hard to make a roast with rice. I was wrong.”
With a shy smile, Angel grabs my arm and leads me over to the couch one room over and makes me sit down. “How are you feeling?” He asks, his hands lifting up the hem of the shirt and inspecting the wound. “I did the best I could to dress it. Luckily it doesn’t look like it anything major.” I can feel my skin humming from his touch.
“What happened?” I question, shaking my head a bit to try and clear the cobwebs. “I remember that we were talking, then pain, then nothing.”
Angel looks at me with genuine concern. “You were hit by a crossbow bolt. You hit the ground pretty quickly, I wasn’t even sure what happened, but once I made sure you were still alive, I tried to see where the attack came from but, whoever they were, they were gone.”
I could see the worry lines start to make their way across his forehead and around his eyes. Putting a hand on his, I attempt to reassure him. “It takes a lot more than a crossbow bolt to kill me, Angel. Anyway, I’m not planning on going anywhere now that I finally have you back. I do have you back, right?”
A small smile plays across his lips as he settles back into the couch, pulling me onto his lap and cradling me to his chest as he remains ever careful of my injury. “I never truly left,” he whispers into my neck as he pulls me into his embrace. Our lips meet with a sweet apprehension, reacquainting ourselves before the kiss becomes more passionate. In a heartbeat I remember exactly what Heaven had been like and tears easily find their way from my eyes. This kiss was both an ending and a beginning; it begged for forgiveness and offered security; expected nothing and promised everything.
The annoying buzz of the ‘emergencies only’ cell phone that I always carried incase Willow needed me drew us apart and after looking at him, longing to be back in his arms, I pulled myself from the couch and grabbed my bag from the foot of the bed in his room.
“You have really bad timing for an emergency Wills.” I say into the phone, surprised by the lighthearted nature of my voice, a tone I hadn’t heard since I was 18 or 19.
“Buffy, it’s Giles. We have a bit of an emergency here. I’m afraid that you might be in danger.” His panicked tone immediately grabbed my attention and the thoughts of Angel and I on the couch were grudgingly moved to the back-burner of my mind.
“What’s going on Giles? Where’s Willow?” I felt the panic begin to rise in my voice but I was quickly calmed as Angel came up behind me and placed both of his hands on my shoulders. Leaning back into him I took a deep breath and started over. “What kind of an emergency Giles? What’s happening?”
I could almost hear Giles take the glasses off of his nose and begin wiping them on his shirt. Old habits die hard, I guess. “There was an attack on the facility. Things came in from every side. Some of them didn’t make it Buffy,” he said, referring to the Slayers in Training, the SIT’s, “but a lot of them did. We don’t know anything about the girls that were out on patrol yet. Willow’s trying to sense them as we speak.”
There was serious apprehension in that man’s voice and I immediately know that there’s something he’s not telling me. Saddly, that usually means that things are worse than he’s trying to make them appear. “Spill, Giles. Now is not the time to start sugar coating things again.” I move over to the bed and sit down Indian style. Angel sits next to me, leans his back against the wall, and pulls me to sit in front of him; his chest as my backrest. I had a feeling this was going to be a long conversation.
After listening to Giles rambling on for nearly 20 minutes about things I wouldn’t have understood any better had I been in front of him; not an ocean away, my patience began to wear thin. “Give it to me straight Giles, what aren’t you telling me?” His voice goes silent on the other end and for a few minutes I would have sworn he had hung up on me.
“It really would be best if you were here. Can’t you come in so that we can talk about this in person?” he pleads, I quickly make a mental note: Giles was asking instead of commanding. Apocalypse. Definitely.
“That really isn’t possible right now, Giles. It would take me about 10 hours to get there.” Silence on the other end. I had him confused now. “I’m in L.A. Giles. I came to see Angel.”
Again, I knew he was wiping his glasses. “You could extend at least the smallest amount of courtesy by keeping me updated with your whereabouts. I know that you may not feel that you need to have a watcher anymore, but the reality is, I am still your Watcher and you should treat me as such.” I can hear the wind deflate from his sails a bit and then talking in the background. I’m pretty sure I hear Willows voice there now, she sounds slightly alarmed. I could hear a few random ‘Oh dear’s’ as Giles attempted to keep his mouth from the receiver.
“It’s bad Buffy,” Willow’s voice said into the receiver, bringing my attention back at full force “I don’t know what Giles has already told you, but we were attacked and they only went after the Slayers. No one else was hurt, and eventually they gained an upper hand, but a lot of them were killed and that’s only here where they were in quantity. I just did a scan of all the SIT’s and I’m not getting a reading on more than half of them.” Her attention is distracted for a moment as I hear Xander in the background ‘Tell her about the surviving bad guy’ he says and Willow comes back to the receiver without missing a beat. “They managed to keep one of the attackers alive. He has a ring, Buffy. He’s from the Order of Taraka, those guys we fought when Kendra first came around. With a spell we managed to find out that they have been hired to eliminate Slayer’s, as in plural.”
I begin to feel my world spin as the gravity of this situation fully sinks in. Slayer’s are being attacked and a lot of them don’t even know how to defend themselves yet. Hell, I’m the ‘Super Slayer’ as Xander likes to call me and even I was caught off guard. This was really happening, I realized, it’s the reason I was almost killed. “Who’s doing this Will? Who hired these guys?”
There’s a long sigh on the other end before Willow begins again. “We don’t know. The only thing we could get is that apparently the person who hired them said that it is against the natural laws of the universe to have more than one Slayer awoken at a time so the entire order of Taraka has been hired to destroy as many Potentials as possible; their order; kill them until only one is left standing or everyone’s dead and the next is called. They’re going after every slayer that we woke, Buffy.” There’s a long pause on the other end of the phone but I know she isn’t done. “I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone, but Buffy, Faith’s missing. I can’t sense her”
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