I don't own the characters in this fanfic, Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Warner Bros. etc. do, and I'm just borrowing them for a little while. Please send feedback; it's much appreciated.
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*** Los Angeles, 2010 ***
It happened quickly, and without warning. Buffy Summers, ex-chosen one, retired after a distinguished career spanning the nine years of her life from ages sixteen to twenty-five, was lying in bed asleep. Next to her lay her husband, who spent most nights watching her sleep, usually trying to figure out what he’d done to deserve her.
They’d married when she was twenty-one, despite his reservations. He’d longed to have her as his wife, since the moment he first fell in love with her, but he’d always believed she deserved better and she’d had a fight on her hands to get him to understand she loved him both despite and because of who he was.
The moment he first saw her he’d known she was the one. The first woman in over two hundred and forty years he’d ever wanted to marry. Yet he’d avoided any allusions to the subject, and had refused, politely, to go further than short ‘make-out’ sessions as she called them, knowing it would hurt them both severely if they had to watch each other recede, her into old age and frailty and him unable to join her, trapped forever in youth, incapable of keeping up with her.
But then that fateful night had come when he’d been helpless to say no, and the horrific months following it when Angelus was in control, and had used the body she’d come to love to hurt her unimaginably.
He’d had his soul returned only moments before he was sent to Hell by her sword, and when he’d returned, by some method he didn’t know about and didn’t want to, he’d left Sunnydale, unable to bear the pain and guilt he saw mirrored in her eyes every time they met.
Their union had brought them both so much pain, the only solution he could see was to get as far away from her as possible.
Buffy, refusing to remain in the town that had caused her so much pain, had left Sunnydale, becoming a mobile Slayer, moving from town to town, city to city, wherever she was needed, cleaning up the places she visited form the scourge of evil and then vanishing into the night before she had a chance to become attached to anyone or anything.
Giles remained in Sunnydale, to be near to the dormant Hellmouth, and provide a stable base of operations from which he researched the latest threats, and kept Buffy with a steady supply of cash, new identities, and travel and living arrangements.
Buffy had told her husband that the only reason she kept on fighting, and living, was the undying hope she never lost that she would one day find him again. And she did, a year after she left Sunnydale, entirely by coincidence.
*** New York, 1999***
She’d been sent to New York to deal with a serial killer dubbed ‘Dracula’ by the media, for his habit of draining his victims blood, and leaving no visible mark except for the two puncture wounds in their necks. Giles was trained in separating the copy-cats, who were to be left to the police, and the real thing, who were to be dealt with, and assured her she was on the trail of a vampire, as opposed to some wacko who thought he was a vampire, or got off on drinking blood. Or someone who just liked to make an impact; serial killers that pretended to be vampires tended to get a higher level of media coverage than the common or garden variety.
Buffy had studied the profile in detail, and had set herself up as bait. She wore a blood-red dress that revealed a lot of skin, had dyed her hair raven black, and left it loose, and she ordered a Bloody Mary in one of the bars in the killers area, all details common to the victims. she thought, disappointed at the unoriginality of his approach.
Sure enough, after only twenty minutes of waiting her senses picked up a vampire, and he slid into the seat beside her. He turned to face her and she could see he was getting ready to deliver his prepared speech.
“Let’s cut to the chase, you and I both know what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this. I’ve got a room at the motel down the road. Ready to go?”
So saying, he slid off his stool and waited patiently by her chair, certain she was hooked. Buffy found herself thinking, slightly cruelly, that the girls deserved to die if they allowed themselves to be picked up by scum solely because they wanted to get laid. Buffy shook her hair out of her eyes and smiled.
“Sure.” She followed him outside, and into an alley. she thought, tensing up.
Then she saw them. He wasn’t a lone killer, he was part of a gang of five vampires, all strong and all at least fifty years a vampire. The oldest looked to be around a hundred.
She decided to stick with the defenceless role for the time-being, in the hopes of not betraying her secret identity. There was a chance she could run, and pick them off one by one. That way if any got away the rumour wouldn’t get out that there was a Slayer in New York. Her job relied on anonymity, and so it was with great regret that she dropped the facade.
She went for the two she judged to be the greatest threat, slamming a stake into one while she punched the other one in the face, dropping him to the floor. He would be up soon but his fall would give her a couple of minutes to take care of at least one of the remaining three still up and able.
Aware of her lack of weaponry, she whipped the stake out of the first vampire just in time to prevent it turning to dust with him. She sent it flying towards another vampire, who dodged.
“Damn,” she swore, knowing it was vitally important she killed them all but unable to see how, given that there were four vampires and she only had two stakes left, three if she could find the one she’d just thrown.
As she circled warily, waiting for the next threat, two of them jumped her from behind and forced her to the ground. Her face smashed into the concrete and a momentary wave of dizziness hit her, as did a solid fist to her cheek.
Then she felt a tug on her hair, and she flipped. She stood up, throwing the two vampires off her.
“Don’t touch the *hair*!” she yelled angrily. “I paid forty dollars *I don’t have* on this hair to catch you freaks!”
She drove a stake into one of the stunned vampires still on the ground after she had tossed him off her, and his companion, also still floored, backed away hurriedly on his backside.
The two vampires still standing stared at her in confusion; they were obviously the dumb muscle and hadn’t figured out who she was yet.
They were desperately trying to decide whether to fight or run, but their decision was made for them when another figure thrust a long wooden pole into the one on the left.
Buffy immediately tackled the other to the ground and used her last remaining stake on it while the late entrant to the fight took care of the one still on the ground.
She looked up just in time to see her mysterious saviour disappear around the corner and to realise who it was.
She threw herself to her feet, running after him and barrelled into him just before he entered the sewers, knocking him to the ground.
“No, you don’t,” she said, glaring at him. “I haven’t spoken to you in over a year, and I have questions I want you to answer.” She lifted him up and threw him against a wall. “How dare you? How could you just *leave*?”
She grabbed him by the collar and hissed at him, “You’d better have a damn good excuse, Angel.”
Then she backed away, and turned her back on him.
“Come on,” she ordered without turning. Sighing, he followed her to her motel room.
“I should have known better than to help you out. It always seems to get me into trouble,” he told her as he slumped down into a chair. “So, what do you want to know?”
Buffy and Angel talked for hours, both trying to come to terms with their lives, and their relationship. Finally they came to a fragile understanding.
It took them two years to regain the love and trust they’d shared, but in that time he was her faithful companion, never once leaving her side if he could help it. They travelled together, she gradually remembering why she’d fallen in love with him in the first place, he discovering new reasons to love her every day.
He found it hard to hide his love and the pain he felt at it not being returned, certain they could never be happy together in that way.
But then Giles e-mailed her with a message that a prophesy had cropped up that she should be in Sunnydale to deal with, and he grudgingly agreed to accompany her, not wanting to return to the place where he’d caused so much pain.
On the boat back, she’d confessed she loved him and he couldn’t prevent himself from admitting his love and asking her to marry him. To the surprise of both of them she’d accepted, and finally turned the claddagh ring she’d worn facing away from her hand for so long. Friendship, loyalty, and love. He’d proven them all to her.
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