Better to Have Loved and Lost
by Alicia
Chapter 1
The night wasn’t quite as cold as Angel had expected it to be. Not that he usually even noticed cold temperatures, of course, but it had been a long time since he had been on foot and still had a human companion to anticipate.
He checked his watch. Vampire night vision didn’t seem to apply to digital numbers; he should make Wesley find him a regular watch with a physical face. Had he given a wrong direction? His convertible was prominently parked in the little rest stop parking lot, but the area was completely deserted.
Angel felt, more than saw, a presence behind him. Vampire, here, along the side of a highway at night, miles from the nearest cemetery? A stunning blow to the side of his head answered that question. Letting out every single word he had choked back in the couple of weeks he had been around Fred, he whirled and hit back, just as hard. The vampire went flying. Angel pulled a stake from his boot and ran to finish the job--
To find a cloud of dust where the nameless vampire had been.
“Not getting any smarter, huh?” There was a cloaked shadow behind the swirling dirt, and it had blonde hair.
“Buffy!” Angel ran the intervening two steps and swept the Slayer tiny right off her feet.
He expected her to make some sort of joke about his strength and make him put her down, but she just clung to him, hard. Finally--lest he make some sort of embarrassing display while holding the warm, breathing body of a girl he had never thought to see again--he set her down and took her hand instead. They meandered along the paths behind the rest stop.
It had been Angel’s idea to meet halfway, and Buffy’s to do it outside, in the dark, somewhere safe but also hidden. He couldn’t exactly go into Los Angeles cafés without being recognized anymore--for that matter, neither could she--and since many of their face to face meetings involved at least some shouting, they had wanted privacy to fight in peace. Now, though, he was having fourth and fifth thoughts about the cold. Even in the cloak, she was shivering. Angel shrugged out of his jacket and wrapped it around her, outside of her clothes.
“Thanks. Thanks for waiting for me, too.”
“Did you have to kill something along the way?”
“No...uh...I just got lost. Cars and Buffy still don’t mix.”
Angel avoided telling her that she just had to make two turns--this was definitely not the right time to pick on her about anything. Besides, he had no idea how disoriented she was, with...everything.
“Two turns is two turns too many,” she said. “There was one highway sign that I thought said...”
He chuckled.
“What?”
“You couldn’t read my mind when you were telepathic.”
“So you said if I ever wanted to know anything--”
“--just ask.”
"Are you okay, Angel? I didn’t have much time to talk...you kinda had to leave with the sun and I don‘t know how much I was listening...and then with everything else...Willow never got over...”
“Buffy.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders, momentarily surprised how natural it still felt--just wanting to touch her, knowing she was there, walking, breathing, talking to him. There was something inside of him that had threatened to thaw and crash since the moment he had heard she was alive, and her question brought it almost the rest of the way down. “Losing you--it made me wonder if I had ever learned to love. If I had really come so far from Angelus after all. You were gone, I was...well, not alive, but...”
“I know the difference.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Even before--”
“You could feel something, something besides the cold?”
Angel shuddered. In one movement he guided her to one of the park benches, swept her down beside him, and enfolded her in both of his arms. It still wasn’t enough, but he remembered that wish he had made, to warm her heart with his own. “I would give anything to spare you that.”
Buffy jumped up. “Not you, too, okay? You don’t be one of those people I have to lie to ‘cause the truth is worse!”
There was a rustle behind the bench. Two more vampires, females that time, had apparently been sleeping beneath it. Now, though, they sensed one fresh meal and one competitor.
Buffy’s hand went into her cloak, and Angel’s into his boot, and two stakes were simultaneously planted in two vampires’ hearts.
Still brandishing that stake, Buffy smiled at Angel. “I’m okay. Right as rain.”
“You can’t lie to me, Buffy.” Off her look, he added, “Oh, whatever, your voice works when you try it, but somehow those words just aren‘t what I hear.”
“You know, maybe I should just go back and...”
Angel backed away a step. “I don‘t want to go yet. I’m not used to this. Now you know as much about death and evil and hell as I do, and I can’t say stuff you don’t know--like ’you don’t feel it, but you are strong,’ but I still want to talk with you, I still want to...”
She drew a deep breath. “It’s not your fault, Angel. I...was in...”
He waited.
She started to say something, then stopped. “Promise you won’t tell anyone? Not even people like Cordelia and Wesley who could tell my friends? Willow would--well, I’m not even imagining that.”
"Of course.”
They resumed walking, hand in hand, and it was a long time later before Buffy spoke again.
“I wasn’t in Hell.”
Angel had suspected as much, even from Willow’s bright phone voice before he had seen Buffy. Willow had been just too pleased with herself, too contented and whole with her friend back, too reluctant to describe Buffy’s current state of mind. Seeing Buffy only added to that, and the new wholeness in his own heart warred with his anger at Willow for meddling, even if that very meddling had saved his life on at least one occasion.
“Maybe I am now.”
“We should have gone someplace warm and lit,” was the only thing Angel could think of to say.
Buffy actually laughed. “You kidding? With all the time you and I spent making out in graveyards?”
She moved as if to kiss him then, but he gently captured her hands and steered her attention to walking. They were already so close, he feared what would come if lost his control. “I love you, and I have never been able to help that.”
"I love you...”
“What about soldier-boy?” Angel kicked himself as soon as the words were out, but he had known he was not Buffy’s only love anymore, as she was his.
“Riley? He left town, like everyone who gets close to me.”
“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” There was a pause, as Angel digested the rest of what she had said. “Being close to you--this is the closest thing to Heaven that I can ever attain. People don’t run from you. They find you.” He tilted her head toward his, and this time he did kiss her. It was brief and soft, painful, and her cheeks were wet.
“Are you crying, Angel?”
"I--” darn it, he couldn’t lie to her either. “I missed you. Even with you alive, when you were so far away and there was no one close who understood any of this--and that’s what we both go back to, since we can’t be together, and here I am brooding about me again...”
“Don’t.” A small hand brushed his face. “We do really stupid things when we’re trying to escape life...hard, and bright, and cold, and feelings just don’t work.”
“I know what you mean. Before, when all there was, was the guilt,” and that hurt to think about: eating rats, attempting to help people and still making their lives worse, struggling to control a nature that ran out of his control, “it kind of squashed out everything else. I didn’t know what real feelings were. Then suddenly there were people to talk with and protect, and there was jealousy again, anger, grief, weakness, and even a touch of forgiveness.”
Buffy looked at the sky as if expecting to see snow, and she squeezed his hand.
“When absolutely no one gets it, it’s like that numbs you as thoroughly as guilt does. You feel the darkness approaching, and you know that to tell anyone would make it more intense--worse, it would make another person vulnerable to the same thing--so you protect everyone, but you lose the ability to even feel it yourself. It’s like there’s nothing left but the cold.” He guided her to the bench, for the third time, wrapping everything he could reach around her tightly as she nestled against him. “Is that anything like being back is for you?”
"Can not knowing what you’re here for numb you like that?”
“Not knowing...?”
“You know, why I’m back. Why another wasn’t just called in my--no, don’t answer that, I don’t want to talk about Faith--but why I’m not done.”
“Yeah...maybe it could. The First brought me back, but knowing that didn‘t help--or the Powers that Be, the good guys, according to--”
“Who?”
"No one...” Angel sighed. “You’re still not supposed to be able to read my mind. When I first came to L.A. and started Angel Investigations and all that, I had a partner who kept making me get out there and seek answers. Irish guy named Doyle. I think you met him that one time when you came to—to see me after I tried to rescue you. He died awhile later.”
"Sorry.”
“Anyway,” Angel brought the conversation back to Buffy; she had better quit making him talk about himself or that ice inside him would be completely gone, “So I don’t know whether I’m here from the good guys or the bad guys, but sometimes that mission seems so far away. Cordelia usually talks me out of those moods, though.”
“Cordelia?”
"She’s changed just a little,” Angel said with a smile. “She still says every single thing she thinks, though.”
“And yet she doesn’t understand, anything of what your world is like?”
“She--” Angel stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt her any more.”
“Oh, what, did you use her eyebrow pencil to stake a vampire?”
He shoved her, playfully, careful not to dislodge her from his shoulder where she had finally stopped shivering. “I fired my whole team, last year. They were standing between me and real darkness, and I didn’t want them in the way. Cordelia took it the hardest.”
“You wanted to protect them.”
“Honestly, Buffy, I don’t know. You get yourself in worse trouble trying to protect people by pushing them away. I didn’t know that then.”
“Two hundred some years old, and still learning the most...”
He shut her up with a kiss, and this one, lacking the melancholy of the first, threatened to become something out of both of their control.
“Well, you didn’t push me away,” Buffy said when they finally came up for air. “Thanks.”
“Any time,” he said wryly. “Did I come close to anything? Why you’re so cold?”
“All of the above. Angel. I have a task that I...guess I can’t ever finish, now I know that for sure. I have people who will freak out if they find out I feel like this, too many people I can still hurt. I’m tired of the responsibility, and just when I thought it was gone, now it’s back and it’s crushing every bit of other feeling out of me. What’s...wrong with me?” She buried her face in his shoulder.
Angel stroked her hair. The idea that anything could be that seriously wrong with her was even more unthinkable than the firm knowledge that he would have to let her go soon. “You were in Heaven.”
“I’ll go back, someday. You’re coming too.”
He had to grin at that, but said, “Not about me, not this time.”
“I knew everyone I loved was safe. You included.”
“I guess there’s an end to this for both of us.”
“Why is that so hard to see? To feel, to make be really there?”
"I wish I knew...I just wish I knew.”
“It helps, that you know, I mean.”
They stood together. There was a pale light in the sky--false dawn--and although the top was up and the windows were covered on Angel’s car and he intended to just stay there until sunset, now that it was actually time, he wondered how he could spend that day alone once more. Buffy was alive. That was what mattered. Not whole, but alive, and he had to send her back and pray that this time she would be able to find happiness.
Buffy was shaking again. She looked so small, and alone, and Angel hated the thought of her driving herself all the way back to Sunnydale with nothing more than she had before but a memory.
"Let’s stay in the car,” Buffy whispered. “’Till sunset, I mean. Can we have one day?”
Angel didn’t want to argue--how he didn’t want to protest!
“Shut up, and come on.”
"I didn’t say anything!” He opened the front door, and extended his hand to Buffy, settling her in the passenger seat. The first flickers of light warmed the black window covers, and he was glad to feel the car’s warmth.
Buffy had noticed the way she had almost read his mind again. He knew. “Angel. Remind me again why we can’t be together?”
“Can we hold on to the hope that someday we will?”
"Too hard. Too far off. We’re becoming too different along the way. I’m scared of everything now.”
“Yeah.”
Silence. The filtered light wasn’t at all unpleasant, and the car turned out to be a cozy place to sit and be with his beloved.
She was asleep.
Angel could think of worse things to do with his day than watch Buffy sleep! He settled her against him, then started to doze, idly letting bits of thought wend their way across his mind. One was never far from the surface: she had to make it, and once he let her go back to her life, the emotions that stirred now would soon be squashed again.
Sometime that day, Buffy started to cry. Angel never knew if she had even woken up, or what kind of a dream brought it on, or whether it was just the pent-up grief that Buffy normally couldn’t feel at all. He held her, wiped her cheeks, and supported her as she drifted in and out of nightmare, in and out of sobbing fits. This, at least, he could do. She would wake cleansed for a time.
He was going to miss her so very badly.
