***Los Angeles, 2010***
Angel reflected on all this as he watched his wife sleep.
They’d long since adopted a lifestyle where Angel stayed in the sunproof basement of the house during the day, sometimes making excursions to visit old friends via the sewers, while Buffy worked. She’d return home, and they either talked, went out for walks, or made love until Buffy had to pause for supper.
They would spend most of the time wrapped in each others minds, sharing everything.
Buffy experienced Angel’s bloodlust and the pleasure feeding gave him for the first time when he agreed to let her be in his mind while he fed from one of the blood packs she brought home from the hospital where she worked as a nurse, and they had adopted a policy of sharing one of their memories with each other every night.
Buffy let Angel see the time when she was told about being the Slayer, when she died, and when she had her first kiss, and in return Angel showed her when Darla turned him, when he made Spike and Drusilla, and what his night with her was like from his point of view.
They were so close, Angel could feel the pain whenever Buffy hurt herself, and Buffy had grown used to picking up on Angel’s thoughts each time his mind turned to guilt and self-recrimination, and putting a stop to them.
Once she’d actually called him from the hospital and commanded him over the phone to get his act together, distance being no barrier to her knowledge of his mood.
Angel usually spent the nights after she’d fallen asleep watching her, having fully rested during the day.
This night was different. There were no warning signs. One minute she was sleeping peacefully, her dreams calm and gentle, the next moment she jerked awake and screamed in such agony it broke his heart. He felt her pain as a red-hot living thing, invading every part of her, but he could find nothing that could be causing it.
He tried to ease her pain by taking some into himself, but it simply increased until all she could do was scream, tears falling down her face, writhing in pain.
Finally the suffering in her eyes was too much, and he gently squeezed her windpipe shut, cutting off her supply of air and sending her into unconsciousness.
He monitored her mind and found to his relief that she could no longer feel the pain.
He telephoned for an ambulance, but was told it would take twenty minutes. < I can get there faster if I go on foot > he decided. He wrapped his wife in a blanket, and lifted her slight form easily, cradling her in his arms. He raced down to the basement, taking care not to bump Buffy, and entered the sewers from the access tunnel in the floor.
He was at the hospital within minutes, and he carefully manoeuvred himself and Buffy up the iron ladder and onto the street outside the Emergency Room.
He carried her in, and Buffy chose that moment to regain consciousness, opening her eyes and screaming immediately. Angel felt the pain burst into her again and was unable to stop it.
A pair of nurses rushed up to him pushing a trolley and coaxed him into laying her down upon it. They immediately began pushing her away while another nurse tried to ascertain what had happened.
By the time he’d explained he knew nothing he’d lost Buffy’s trail, and he couldn’t pick up her mind in the cacophony of pain and fear that comprised the emergency room.
When he tried to find out where she was, the hospital staff feigned ignorance and he could tell they didn’t want him to see her. They found out she worked at the hospital and checked her records, finding Willow and Xander’s addresses.
Her parents were both dead, and the only family she had was him.
Willow and Xander were there in minutes, since they all lived in LA at the moment. The doctors refused to tell them anything, and Willow couldn’t find a computer terminal from which to hack into the records.
Finally, in desperation, Angel cornered a doctor and read his mind, a little-used talent Angel had acquired many years ago that rarely worked. He discovered that the doctors had no idea what was wrong with her, all they knew was that she was in pain and they were powerless to end it.
She had the symptoms of a dozen different diseases, her heartbeat was erratic, she had trouble breathing but no sooner had they put her on a respirator than she stopped needing it, her blood pressure went from dangerously high to almost nonexistent.
Every few minutes another part of her body started to fail: her sight was fading, she was most probably lame, she was suffering from massive internal bleeding but the doctors couldn’t figure out which part was bleeding, or how to stop it.
She was dying, slowly and painfully, and the only thing that could be done for her now was to pump her full of painkillers and wait for the end.
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