Setting: end of season 2 ATS, end of season 5 BTVS
The Angel gang enters the lobby after returning from Pylea
Willow is sitting in the lobby; face red, and marred by tears
Eternal Loss
"It's Buffy."
He fell to his knees as he spoke the words, and the world went black. He didn't need to hear it voiced. The loss that filled her eyes, wet with the tears she attempted to hold back unsuccessfully, spoke volumes.
He felt her wrap her arms around him, kneeling in front of him, now freely crying. He wished he could give her the warmth she so desperately sought; however, he was frozen under an onslaught of emotion. He had never once felt the cold caused by the lack of blood running through his veins, until this very moment. Emotion asserting its power over his physical being, he remained prostrate under the crushing weight of this bruising knowledge. He attempted to shake his head, to shake out the rushing sound of absolute silence.
His world was never silent. There was always something that invaded his inhuman hearing. But here it was now, a silence he had once craved now bitter on taste buds dead for hundreds of years, awakened only once since then, and it was she he had tasted, so sweet, so alive, now soured with death.
Yet he shouldn't be surprised. He knew this day would come. He was immortal, she was not. But he foolishly thought he'd have years upon score of them to prepare him for her death. The possibility had always been there that she could die young, as slayers often did, however she was different from the rest. She had a power in her the others had lacked, an ability to allow others into her life, if not fully, enough that they had her back in the most daunting of times. He'd once shared this place in her life.
How stupid his sacrifice for her happiness now felt, as it may have played a part in her death. He should have been there, here, in this dimension, for her. Perhaps then he'd have felt her imminent death. They'd always been able to feel one another. But would he have felt her despair and pain in time?
He'd failed her by choosing another woman over his one and only love. If only he'd known he was making this choice; would he have chosen differently? It was then that he focused his attention on this woman. She sat crumpled on the stairs a look of shock upon her face, one solitary tear now marring its perfection. Did she feel it, this loss for someone whose presence she seemed to merely tolerate? Would she have been given a vision of the tragedy to come if she too had not been on another plane?
The questions racked his core, yet he shed not one tear. It was anger he felt; at the world, at the powers, at the nature of the lives they led, for it was this that had killed her, but the murderer was he, and for that he would never forgive. The redemption he sought now irrelevant, as he had sought it for her, for them, and his hope that one day he would earn his humanity and thus a place in her life.
Now all he had was her death upon his hands. He looked at them now, half expecting to see her blood caked upon them, yet all he saw was a blur of flesh as the tears that had seemed locked in a dungeon now broke past the prison of his eyes. He felt his control falter, and then finally give, from the vision of the bleak eternal years to come that her spirit would not fill. Their union forever lost as even his death would not bring them together. He was sure his black soul was meant for a place far from the peace and light hers now existed in.
While she basked in the glow of tranquility, he would burn in the fires of damnation.
A/N – I always hated that we never really got to see Angel mourn for Buffy…so this is my take on that event. Tell me what you think.
