1. Beneath the streets of Los Angeles, his borrowed blood mixed with another’s and he took his first real breath in over two centuries. He walked in the sunlight, ate until he felt like he might burst and made love with the women he loved until he was exhausted. It was perfect. He knew it couldn’t last.
2. Lindsey left Wolfram and Hart, and was probably dead-in-a-ditch somewhere. During Lilah Morgan’s first Lindsay-free day, she went through his notes and decided that bringing Angel’s sire back was the wrong way to take care of the Angel problem. Instead, she had employed mercenaries to kidnap Angel’s friends, and he turned himself into Wolfram and Hart in order to guarantee their safety. Lilah had him strapped to a chair, and a medic stuck an IV into Angel’s arm, injecting Mohra blood into his veins. Lilah smiled and said that Wolfram and Hart has ears everywhere and heard that this worked once before, and Angel felt his heart start to beat. She patted him on the shoulder and told him that he was no longer a threat, and let him go. Angel visited the Oracles only to find their dead bodies, and went back to his office and made Cordelia and Wesley breakfast. He ate his own eggs, and thought that he wasn’t a half-bad cook. He decided to branch out in making pancakes, and gave Buffy a call the next day.
3. The monks Angel was staying with were actually members of a demon cult hell-bent on bringing on the apocalypse. Angel stopped them, enjoying the familiar feel of a battle and the autopilot his mind went to. After the battle ended, the Oracles appeared, smiles on their faces, and they granted him his humanity. At the moment, he felt like he could have killed them. He vaguely entertained thoughts of suicide, but had neither the will nor the guts to do it. He ended up putting five dollars into a pay-phone and calling Cordelia from half-way around the world to tell her that he was alive. He was not alone in the world, and he went home. Buffy was brought to life thirty-five days later, and he came to Sunnydale to see her. She looked like the death that he no longer was, and he tried his best to fuck his own life into her. Buffy woke up in his warm arms and he saw a ghost of a real smile flicker across her face. It was a start.
4. The Valet had taken a shining to Angel, and while he could not grant Darla life, he told Angel that he had won one, in case he want to redeem it for future use. When Buffy died, Angel ran as fast as he could to ask for the life he won to be given to her. The Valet’s face fell, and he told Angel that Buffy too, had been returned to life once before, and that he could not grant his request. Later, when Cordelia was trying to convince him that Connor needed a parent that could go out in the light, Angel looked into his son’s eyes and decided that he could be that parent. He took Connor-and Cordelia, Gunn, Wesley and Fred-to the Valet and he asked for a life to be granted. His own. He held his son and walked into the sunlight, noting the other parents toting around their children in the sunshine-streamed streets of Los Angeles, and ignored the small voice in the back of his head telling him that he didn’t deserve any of this.
5. Angel felt slayers approach, but he was too deeply entrenched in the battle to turn his head and say hello. He killed the demon he was currently battling, and saw Faith, Buffy and other girls who he didn’t know from Adam swarm around to fight his Alamo. He heard Faith say something about Connor calling her, and he stole one glance at Buffy, but his head was in the fight until it was over. Once the dust had settled, the Shanshu he had disregarded and signed away became a reality, and he was no longer a vampire. Buffy helped him back to the Hyperion, which was somehow still standing, and patched up his wounds. Someone, probably Faith, as no other of his friends still lived, called Connor, and wordlessly, he joined Buffy in putting antiseptic and gauze on his broken, human body. He thought the two people standing over him were more miracles than his now-beating heart, but he was secretly grateful.
The End
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