Q) How do Spike, Buffy, and Angel end up together?
a) necessity
Buffy is wearing a smart black pin-striped suit. Her hair is clean and smells slightly of apples. It is parted neatly and tied into a knot at the nape of her neck. She taps her fingers impatiently on the case file, waiting for…
She forgets their names. She opens the file to remind herself.
Spike and Angelus. What a pair. She allows herself a small smile. Of course, many of their clients have eccentric names, but these might just take the cake.
Buffy is sitting alone in a huge Wolfram & Hart conference room. There are usually large windows to her back, but these two don’t enjoy the afternoon sun, so the blinds are shut tight. Two mugs filled with human blood heated to 98.6 degrees are set at the other end of the table. That’s one of the things that Buffy loves about her job – the company is always willing to make their clients happy.
Eleven minutes, three seconds late, the two men walk in. Buffy doesn’t blink at their leather-heavy ensembles – she’s definitely seen worse. Once, she even had to clean up the slime afterwards.
“Hello, and welcome to Wolfram & Hart.” Buffy shows them her practiced smile. “My name is Buffy Summers, and if you take a seat, we can begin.”
*
She knew what she was dealing with, of course. She had read their file. They had been tearing across continents, leaving a trail of bloody corpses, for hundreds of years. They are considered the baddest of the bad. The current Slayer – Kennedy something – a super tough bitch that even Wolfram & Hart is careful of - fought them and barely escaped with her life.
These guys aren’t what she expected. Buffy had made treaties costing the lives of thousands, exchanged babies for service to her company, and protected the worst kind of people. She knows evil when she sees it, and these guys… don’t exactly fit the bill.
Spike, first of all, William the Bloody, keeps making passes at her. It is rather unnerving. He has a British accent, different than Buffy’s boss Giles’, rougher, and she is embarrassed to admit it isn’t entirely repulsive. And Angelus just keeps making tasteless jokes that he probably thinks are menacing. The two of them don’t act like the scariest things around.
*
They’re here to negotiate their rights in L.A. They’re moving in and want to make sure that- in the unlikely chance that anything unfortunate happens- Wolfram & Hart will protect them.
There’s some talk of offerings, of money, of business-like things. When they reach a stalemate in which neither party will budge, Spike orders in a bottle of champagne and one of Buffy’s associates (one she’s always competed with) comes in, embarrassed. Buffy smiles, feeling immensely superior to him, talking with clients while he brings in the drinks.
“Come on, pet, just a glass or two,” Spike pleads, when Buffy refuses to take any. He begs for a bit more, until she gracefully picks up one of the flutes and takes a tiny sip.
She has always prided herself on being fairly good at holding her alcohol, but its very good champagne, it goes down smooth, and the bubbles are making her eyes skip around. Angelus seems much more attractive, now, and he’s hilariously dumb when he’s drunk.
“You guys, this is my office!” she squeals, as Spike sloppily refills her drink. “I can’t be drunk. You can’t be drunk! You guys are… so drunk.”
"Blondie's pretty, Spike," Angelus comments. His long, thick body is poured over the black leather chair, reclined almost horizontally. "Pretty and blonde."
“Pet,” Spike hiccups. “Pet, you have to just relax a bit. All the evil corporation is getting to you. Far too tense.”
*
Far too tense turns into a massage; a very bad massage that Buffy pretends is very nice. The massage turns into Spike kissing her, which is much better, but it’s still obvious that he is drunk.
“Just to let you know,” Buffy says breathlessly. “If either of you bite me, one of our overhead sensors will go off and…” She pauses to gasp. “And you’ll dissolve into a billion bitty little pieces.”
“Good on you,” Spike mutters into her shoulder. The table is freezing cold underneath her and the vampires (now Angelus has joined in – when exactly that happened, she can’t remember) are colder above her.
*
Sleeping with Angelus and Spike hadn’t been a definite part of the plan, but Buffy and Giles had decided to keep it open as a possibility. He told her, “If it seems necessary, if they refuse to agree to our terms, then do, ah, what you must.” She grinned at him and said she would.
They agree very quickly, after the combination of good drink and good sex, to the terms proposed by Wolfram & Hart.
“Look us up, pet,” Spike tells her as she buttons up her shirt and slides her black pumps back on. “If you’d like.” Angelus just nods and follows Spike out.
Buffy had planned on the act itself, but hadn’t planned on it being good. She hadn’t counted on Angelus’ hands or Spike’s lips or those deliciously cool, lifeless bodies being so very…
She closes the case file with a slam, and hands it off to Giles, vowing to never think of it again.
b) bloodlust
Buffy twirls the stake experimentally between her fingers. It’s easy now, and it feels cool. Being a superhero, even if there are thousands of other superheroes just like her. Which actually kinda sucks the fun out of being special.
She doesn’t really run into the other Slayers. Xander, her Watcher or Looker or whatever, knows how she feels about being the un-special kind of special, and never has her work with the other girls. He tells her she’s the only one for about fifty or sixty miles around, anyways. She doesn’t know if she believes him.
Tonight is her first real patrol. She’s been running drills for three months, and all she’s heard is that she’s not good enough yet. Yeah, she thinks, not as good as Faith yet.
Faith is the real Slayer. Xander says that maybe one day, Buffy’ll get to meet her. He talks about her like he’s in love with her, and at the same time like she’s Jesus or something. It’s an insanely weird combination. Buffy doesn’t know if Faith is all that Xander says, but she did create bunches of Slayers out of a scythe, with some witch-y help from another girl Xander speaks about in god-like tone – Tara.
It’s mid-November, but in southern California, that doesn’t mean much. She zips up her windbreaker, anyways. The noise is rather jarring in the dark, and she swears, knowing Xander would kill her if he knew she was making unnecessary noise.
*
Buffy has been wandering around the cemetery for an hour, and she hasn’t seen any fledglings at all. But she keeps getting this creepy feeling – like someone’s watching her. And not in a professional capacity.
She stops her breathing, and stops moving. She listens, very carefully, turning to explore the inky darkness around her.
“We don’t breathe, if that’s what you’re listening for.”
“Sorry, pet, for all that training to go to waste.”
They step out of the shadows, two of them, side by side. Buffy tightens her grip on her stake, tossing her head to get the bangs out of her eyes. Her other hand slips inside her pocket. The wooden cross is in there, and the longest end is sharpened enough to turn a bad guy into dust.
“Don’t even bother, love.” One of them steps closer. He smells like the inside of Xander’s liquor cabinet. He’s wearing a long black leather jacket that is very 90s and he has platinum blond hair that is very Billy Idol. “You’ll be dead before you get it stuck in the right spot.”
The other one, darker, with a prominent brow, is right behind her, and he smells like cheap beer. Great, Buffy thinks. Drunk rowdy vampires. Exactly what I need.
“I want you to know… I’m a Slayer. I’m prepared for situations like this!” Buffy tells them, and can’t help but let her voice tremble a little.
“I’ll bet you are,” the dark one says. His voice vibrates through her. “Now, why don’t you stake me?” She’s just plain terrified and wishing Xander were here, with his lame eye patch and his skill with a crossbow, or that he didn’t let her go out tonight.
She falls in the mud, and it splatters all across her new jeans. She looks down at them. They were really expensive, and now they’re ruined.
Okay. Now, Buffy is pissed.
She leaps upward, gets the Billy Idol leather freak with a roundhouse kick to the face, and then, after quickly catching her balance, swings her foot into the other one’s crotch.
Their game faces come on, but all the allowance that Buffy wasted on these jeans is burning hot in her brain. She is just about to plunge the stake into the darker one, when Xander grabs her elbow and hauls her off.
“Good job, Buffster,” he tells her. She looks at him, wide-eyed.
“Wait, this was a set-up?” If anything, she’s angrier. “You made me think I was in mortal danger and ruined my True Religions for nothing?”
“It wasn’t for nothing!” Xander squeaks. It’s the first time Buffy has actually scared him, no matter how much she tries threatening him. “You’ve had a first fight, but it was actually safe.”
“Fine,” Buffy pouts. “I’ll yell at you about this later. How did you get vampires to agree to stalk but not kill me?”
“Old friends,” Xander says, grinning at the two who don’t return his smile. “Two brooding bad boys with souls. Survived a handful of apocalypses.” Buffy has heard of them, so she nods politely, but takes Xander’s hand and lets him lead her away after they’ve said their good-byes. She’s really seventeen but she still needs a little bit of a father once in a while.
*
“Don’t you guys have anything better to do?” Buffy asks Spike and Angel one night. It’s four in the morning, and they’re sitting in a twenty four hour diner, pretending to help Buffy with her Geometry homework. “I mean, vampire-with-soul-y things to do?”
Spike and Angel exchange one of those cryptic looks that Buffy can’t begin to comprehend. “Not exactly,” Angel says finally. Buffy rolls her eyes, tapping her pencil frantically on the edge of her textbook.
Ever since that first night, they had been around, not every single day, but almost. They patrol until two or three, and then come to the same diner. Angel orders black coffee, Spike orders wheat toast with butter, and Buffy gets pancakes with strawberries. Then they take her shopping – getting stupid things like mints and giant sunglasses and apple shampoo.
"You guys are like, huge in the fight against evil, though. You should be out fighting the good fight. And I'm not talking about the one against two column proofs." Angel and Spike have another one of their looks.
*
Spike and Angel appear at evening to pick her up now. All her friends coo when they see them, but Buffy assures them there’s a whole lot of nothing going on. They look at her oddly. She’s been pretty distant to them for a few months, but it’s not like she can tell them that she has a sacred birthright to kill demons and vampires.
“Are you trying to protect me, or something?” Buffy asks, but all she gets is another one of their looks that excludes her.
*
“Prophecy.” Buffy feels a knot rising in her throat. She looks up, staring at Xander’s stricken face. “I see. So when’s it going to happen?”
“After you… when you destroy the Master.” He reaches out to stroke her hair, as he often does, but she jerks away.
“Didn’t your precious Faith stake him good?” she asks, wringing her hands in her lap. She laughs nervously. “So I guess she’s not as fucking amazing as you pretend she is. Does she even exist? Have you been lying to me this whole time? Is there even such things as Slayers?”
“Yes, Buffy.” Angel and Spike stand silently in the back of the room while Xander tries to reason with her. Like she’s some sort of badly behaved child. “It’s all true. I’m sorry. They… well, some vampires brought him back. They… They killed Giles.”
Giles is another one of the people that Buffy always hears about but has never actually seen. “Why?” she asks. “Did they prophesize that, too?”
“No,” Xander says. She can tell he’s upset, but she doesn’t care right now. “It was part of the ritual. They needed his blood.”
“And now they need mine?” Her voice turns into a squeak. “All because, what? Some old guy wrote it a million years ago? What if we just stop it?”
He says there’s more to it than that. She stopped listening a while ago. Her eyes are closed when she goes to the weapons cabinet. Xander is protesting, but the ringing in her ears is too loud to hear over.
*
“Stop following me!” she shrieks. They follow her, anyways. She smashes a bottle of holy water on the ground, and kisses Angel first. They act as if they have been expecting this, like this is the reason they’ve been hanging around like a pair of night stalkers.
Spike shears off his jacket, and it falls to the ground gracefully. Buffy swings her legs around Angel’s waist, kisses Spike over his shoulder, every muscle in her body on fire. Her tears meld with their lips, until everything is so desperate, and she’s just clawing at them, these dead things, because she’s afraid to be one of them.
Their clothes lay forgotten as corpses as they move together, three like one, eyes rolled back into skulls, scraping fingernails on dewy backs, Buffy gasping and panting in the middle as they drive into each other.
The moon is bloated and heavy. They gather their clothes in silence, but before they separate, Buffy stretches her neck out, and her terror and her fury and a million other emotions beat together in those thick veins, just beneath a thin layer of skin. They bite because there’s no other option, and she counts one, two, three Mississippi, and they lap up Macintosh colored liquid from her throat before she pulls away, and smiles, pushing her fingers to wounds that will be scars. She grips her axe and prepares for her death.
c) depression
“Is it a vampire?”
“I don’t think it’s an anything.”
Angel opens his eyes. There are two people standing over him, all pale light streaming and burning. He shies away, pushing his face into the brick wall.
"Its definitely a vampire. I have a sense for these things.” One of them is a woman, the one talking now. “Because of the Slayerness.”
“Oh really?” The man asks sarcastically. “Wait, are you the Slayer? Do you, by any chance, slay vampires? Chosen birthright and all that? Why, I never! The things you learn about people that you think you know!”
“Oh, shut up. Should I stake it? It looks so… sad.”
Angel finally looks up, every nerve ending in his body screaming for finality. “Please.” His voice is unused, and comes out as a beast-like growl. “Please, kill me. I need you to kill me.”
“Wait,” the man says. Angel tries to focus his vision on him. The voice sounds achingly familiar. “Wait a sodding moment. Is that Angelus?”
“Wait, you mean?” the woman’s tone is too complex to decipher. “Angelus. Your sire. The one who disappeared and got a soul before you made it cool? The one who has been missing in action for ages? The one who could have averted the apocalypse you almost died for? The one that Giles and Jenny have three hundred people searching for?” Her voice becomes more and more high pitch as she speaks, and Angel sees her gripping the man’s leather coat. He realizes all of a sudden, that it’s Spike. He giggles. In a million years, he never thought he would see Spike again – he assumed that he had gotten himself staked good and proper trying to kill another Slayer. Apparently, these days, he is just working with them.
“Yup,” Spike says. “That’s pretty much the only Angelus I know.”
“Angel,” he manages to croak out. “I’m called Angel now.”
“Well, Angel,” replies Spike, “your lack of presence has caused quite a fuss. Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we? See if there’s a useful vampire under there?”
“I should call Jenny,” the girl says absently. “She’s been dying to call off the manhunt for him. She’s positive he’s staked.”
“We all were.” Spike’s face tightens, and then stretches into a toothy smile as he slips an arm around Angel’s back.
*
“Huh. Look. He’s handsome.” Spike wrinkles his nose at Buffy, and she flushes slightly. “What? He is!”
“He’s my sire. He’s… well he was bad!”
“So were you!” Buffy rolls her eyes. “Let’s give him a haircut.”
Angel just sits like a dummy in the plush chair, lets them perfect him to their standards. He doesn’t understand why they’re doing this. He doesn’t care, either. Spike gives him a drink of blood from his own store – and its human blood. Buffy is wearing a long sleeved shirt, but Angel knows there would be marks there if he looked.
Huh. He had heard of people paying vampires to drink them, but not of a domestic couple, one half vampire, where the woman bleeds herself willingly into Tupperware containers for husband dearest.
He drinks her blood and stares at her, so pretty and golden. He wants to ask why she would settle for stupid Spike, a lovely carving of ivory like her. He doesn’t, though. He smells her perfume and wonders if he is capable of falling in love.
*
During the day, when Buffy is out, Spike fills Angel in on what has been going on in the world, leaving considerable gaps scantily filled by those strange, tight looks.
It’s not until a month later that he figures out why. He comes home (strange, he’s thinking of Buffy and Spike’s apartment as home) to find Buffy looking at a photo album and crying. He sits down next to her, strokes her lovely hair, tells her it’ll be okay.
“No.” Her voice is tense. “No, it won’t, because of you. All these people… they’re dead because of you.” Angel tells her that he doesn’t understand. Crystalline globs of water hover at the corner of her eyes. “Don’t you get it? You were supposed to be there! You were supposed to save all of them. But you weren’t. You didn’t. We… The prophecies said that you were supposed to be there. They said it.”
Angel lets her point out all the pretty faces gone from the world, because of his disobedience to the prophecies.
“Bad things are coming,” she tells him, after putting the album away. “Maybe more apocalypses. Hell gods, demons from other dimensions. I have to know you’ll be there this time, and the next time. I have to know that… that you won’t…”
He soothes her worries with a kiss, long and languid, lilting on the tip of his tongue. She tastes as glorious as she looks, and he can feel the blood pulsating through her mouth.
Her hair smells like apples.
*
Spike comes home, Angel and Buffy together in his bed, curled in on each other. Their skin is sticky from sweat and their faces from dried tears. He pulls off his black shirt, and pulls himself behind Angel. The combination of hot and cold, one in front, one behind, makes him shiver. Spike kisses the hard line of his jaw, and he won’t cry, Angel knows this, but Buffy’s shoulders still spasm from sobs, and nothing will make that okay.
d) ecstasy
Spike is following them like a kicked puppy through most of Europe. Angel and Buffy know that he’s there, constantly just a step behind, a town over or sometimes just a hotel room. Angel stretches his new human muscles in the mirror, admiring each one separately, while Buffy slinks around him like a trapped cat.
Spike is always there, though. Buffy brings Angel to clubs where he sits at the bar drinking expensive wine while she swirls around with various blondes, male and female, catching her ex-vampire lover’s eye and grinning manically.
Always blond. She grips their yellow golden hair in between her strong fingers when she dances or kisses them, knowing that Angel is watching, his new heart skipping beats. They both imagine that it’s Spike, and they both know the real Spike is close by, sometimes watching himself, and they both wait for him to take his chance.
*
They’ve made it all the way to Amsterdam before he does. During the day, Buffy and Angel are just another sight-seeing couple, tourists to the bone, oohing and ahhing at the appropriate intervals, carrying around binoculars and cameras. They discover each other anew every single day, and they kiss at every landmark. Angel is even developing a tan, which fascinates Buffy to no end. She never thought she’d see him with skin the color of honey or cinnamon, but he gets darker and darker, and his clothes get lighter, airy white shirts, but deep in his core, he’s still the Angel she loves, because they fight wayward demons and vampires together and he broods, and she feels some days that her tiny heart might explode with what she feels for him.
Still, they think of Spike. They think of his still-pearly skin and his still-black leather jacket, and his low rough accent rumbling down their spines, and they miss him, and all they want is to find him, to catch him lurking around after them, tear off his worn out clothes in the middle of the street, and devour him.
*
Angel has no interest, but Buffy has been doing some light drugs throughout their travels. He says he’ll stick to his wine, and reminds Buffy if anything gets too serious, the trip is over immediately. It’s hard for him to deny her anything, especially when she smiles and her hand moves like that, but he watches her and takes care of her, and she promises its only experimentation and looks down her nose at addicts.
She’ll never smoke anything, because she always coughs awfully. She’s snorted cocaine a couple of times, but she won’t inject anything, either. Mostly she likes those colorful little tablets that melt on her tongue in an explosion of chemicals. Sometimes they have pretty designs on them. She haggles using caveman signals, hands over foreign coins after tough negotiations, never sure if she’s overpaying or even paying with the right currency.
Buffy isn’t sure they give her the right effect. She doesn’t act like some of her peers – wandering around in a private wonderland. Everything gets painfully sharp, until she can feel constellations of stars burning on the backs of her eyeballs, and she has so much energy. Those nights, she dances with anonymous blonds until the sun rises.
Spike shows himself suddenly a night when Buffy is high. He appears, and the crowd parts around him like the Red Sea. Even from far away, Buffy hears Angel’s new breath hitch and shudder, and her lungs seem to have collapsed. His arms are exactly the way she remembered and fantasized about – strong and sinewy and not as thick as Angel’s, perfect in their own right, snug around her. And they dance, and her tiny leather mini skirt rubs against his tight black denim jeans. She leans in close to his shoulder, rubbing her nose against the duster, and almost cries from joy.
*
The millions of people around don’t seem to care, or even notice, when Buffy slides her arms under Spike’s shirt and grips his shoulders, or when he takes his cold (so cold, vampire cold) fingers to her thighs and lifts her up. Only Angel sees the skirt sliding up and the jeans unbuckled, and if he were still a vampire, he would be holding glass shards instead of wine, but it’s pretty close to breaking anyways. His mouth is dry and all the newly human parts of him are thrumming with excitement.
Spike kisses her collar bone, but doesn’t bite her, as they move together, up and down, just a shadow of another couple to everyone else dancing. Angel finishes the wine (red wine, the closest thing to blood) and he joins them. His body pins Buffy to Spike, so that Spike’s hands are free, inching up and down Angel’s tan arms, and he kisses him over Buffy’s minute shoulder.
Angel breaks away suddenly, and bites down on his Slayer’s sweaty skin, not quite drawing blood, but almost hard enough. Her back is arched almost to a breaking point, and her hair spills down Angel’s new white shirt, her throat making empty gasping noises.
Spike must have bit his lip, because when he kisses him again, it’s a lovely swirl of that red liquid Angel has missed these months so badly. Around them, people are picking up on their show, so it’s lucky that Buffy shudders and comes just then, and they climb apart, awkward now, as three separate beings.
*
Walking to the hotel is painful and silent, and none of the three are sure how they do it without melting suddenly into puddles on the streets.
Buffy is glad that they splurged on this hotel, as they file into their room, mostly clean, with the white sheets that haven’t yet been touched. They don’t have time to get all their clothes off before they’re all on the bed, only removing the bits that get in the way, and there are scratches that feel good where clothing rips into them. Buffy vows not to do drugs anymore, the wooden headboard snapping into splinters under her grip, this is so much better.
An hour later, they stop, and two of them breathe, and the remainders of their clothes are stripped away. Now they move in pairs, and one watches, desperately clawing at things until it’s their turn again.
*
They don’t leave the hotel room all day, which Buffy thinks is a fun and romantic idea. Spike takes cigarette breaks and Buffy orders strawberries and waffles from room service, but mostly it’s just the three of them and those no-longer-so-clean sheets.
Around sunset, Buffy and Angel pass out. They wake up at one in the morning, to find it’s just the two of them again. Spike is gone, but he left a hasty note that told them not to look, but he’d find them again one day. Buffy isn’t sure what to feel, washing her hair with apple shampoo in the shower, wondering if this is the worst or the best thing that has ever happened to her.
e) none of the above
She comes to the alley after all the monsters have had their fill, consumed everything vaguely alive and left nothing behind. Her heart skips a beat every pile of dust or every body, waiting for that feeling, that knowing, that Spike and Angel are dead.
Dawn walks just a step behind her, brushing her fingertips on Buffy’s back, or her hand, tiny ounces of comfort to fill up the aching nothing inside of her. The rest of the Slayers have split up. They came with fifty and will leave with less. But Buffy trusts them – trusts their survival instincts, trusts that most of them will follow her out of this hallowed city.
Faith had gripped her hand tight and kissed her on the cheek, before taking the scythe, wishing her good luck. Faith knew why Buffy was really here – on this clean-up mission.
*
She had heard too late, that those stupid men had decided to take on a Satanic organization. She was on the fastest plane over, but she still arrived a few days after the battle was over, after the buildings were leveled, after all the people were dead. A few Slayers had run into the chaotic mess, helped evacuations, but there wasn’t enough time.
*
It’s this alley. She knows. This alley is the alley where they had lived their last moments – or where they are spending their last minutes. They wouldn’t have left this alley, either way.
When she finds them, she almost starts to cry.
*
Fucking the Immortal had been fun, yes. Dancing around while she knew her boys were watching her – that was fun, too. She didn’t turn around, didn’t approach them, thinking she still had centuries of time to find them, to resolve things, to finish baking or whatever the fuck analogy she had used.
Then she got that call. She can’t even remember who made it. One of the L.A. Slayers, or someone else. For the life of her, she can’t remember who she had spoken to, or what exactly they had said, only that she needed to leave right now.
*
There are just little piles of them left. How they survived this long, anyways, she doesn’t know. She presses her tiny hands to each of their chests, hiccupping with joy as she feels twin, weak heart beats just there.
“Funny, isn’t it,” Spike rasps out. He doesn’t even sound alive, anymore, just like a whisper from beyond the grave. “Two vampires with souls. Two new human beings. ‘Cept, they must have divided the life span up, because neither of us has much left.”
He coughs, dry and hacking like a lung is trying to come out. Buffy tears bandages out of her expensive white sweater, tries to get their blood to stay in their bodies. Angel is borderline unresponsive, but when she’s leaning over him to examine a particularly nasty burn on his left arm, he smells her hair and sits up.
“Apples,” he says. “Buffy.”
She tells them not to say their goodbyes, because they are going to survive this. They laugh together like the old comrades they are, and their still-cool arms brush up against each other.
Dawn is calling the other Slayers for help. There aren’t any hospitals for miles, but they can get a car and drive them. You’re going to live! Buffy shouts, over and over again, pressing her fingers to their cheeks and their foreheads, watching in horror as the patches of her sweater get swallowed up in red.
*
“I’m driving!” Dawn exclaims when Buffy tries to take the keys from her. “I found the freaking thing and you’re an awful driver under normal circumstances!”
Angel is awake now, babbling incoherently, but Spike’s eyes have begun to glaze over. Buffy sits in between them in the back seat, tearing up more and more clothing to press to wounds that don’t seem to ever clot.
*
The doctors look worried when they tell her that her boys are in good hands. Buffy is wrapped up in someone else’s jacket, all of her clothes are fragments of full outfits, and she’s freezing cold. Dawn still hovers just behind her anxiously.
*
They bring her in to see Angel just before he dies. They tell her that there’s too much damage, there is nothing left they can do but make him comfortable. She feels sobs roaring up in her stomach but stifles them, clutching his hand and listening to his final speech, his final confession.
She kisses him good-bye and his mouth tastes like blood and ashes, nothing like what he had tasted like as a vampire – none of that silky cleanness that she had loved. He looks at her in the eye and tells her its fine – he’s been to hell before. He dies watching her laugh.
*
Spike is in surgery for five hours, but the doctors say they can’t save him, either. Buffy still pushes those tears down, deeper and deeper, into a pocket of air in the pit of her stomach.
Spike doesn’t want her to hold his hand. He tells her to lighten up, gasping for air that he hasn’t needed for hundreds of years. He says that she’ll be much happier with him gone (again), with Angel as a happy husband. Buffy doesn’t have the heart to tell him Angel is gone
She tells him that she loves him, and this time he says, I love you too, very faintly, before his eyes flutter shut.
The End
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