A/N This is one of my older fics. I thought I should share it with you. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own Angel.

It was so utterly final and so utterly sudden. They had been living in denial these past months. If they couldn't see an apocalypse coming, they assumed it wasn't coming. Then Angel said those words:

"Live today like it's your last… because it probably is."

That was the second it sunk in: everything they had lost and everything that they couldn't hold onto. There would be no sunny future for them and most of them wouldn't make it through the night. It just felt so short notice, as though they should have been preparing themselves for a while.

Hadn't they been, though? The events of the past years had prepared them, transformed them, just for this purpose: to die.

Live. Such a concisely expressed concept.

Spike wasn't alive so really living was a bit defunct for him. Yet he knew what his passion had been when he did live. His dream was for his poetry, his bloody awful poetry, to be liked, appreciated, hell, a bit of measly applause would do. And his other love was his alcohol so his day planned itself.

Lorne wasn't a fighter. His purpose in life was to sing; he'd known it since he was just a kid in Pylea. All Lindsey really had was Eve and he loved her. It was easy for them to choose a last day.

Gunn had never done much living. He was more of a survivor and survivors do not ever give in to the absolute certainty of death. He had no family or even close friends anymore. A thought struck him. A survivor doesn't live his last day any differently to the rest of his life. If he had free time whilst working for Angel he would be helping others to survive. Never mind 'the muscle', that was what he did best. So Gunn visited an old friend who gave him just the answer he had hoped for. If none of it ever mattered and nothing changed she would continue to work to help people.

For Wesley, however, the idea of living was one he just couldn't conceive. He hadn't lived properly in months. Didn't living involve happiness? Up and downs? People to share it with? He had none of that without Fred so he sat with Illyria, just waiting to feel something. He wasn't even worried or scared that he wasn't worried which was disconcerting. He found that for the first time in his life he didn't care.

And people who don't care will never understand the people who do. Angel spent his last day with the one person who was the embodiment of living for him. A living, breathing human born from two dead things of which he was one. Connor. He let himself get swept away in his son's wonderful new non-apocalyptic life, safe in the knowledge that nothing could touch him anymore; Connor was safe and that was all he cared about.

There were no goodbyes when it got down to it. Nothing they could say would make it any better or easier. They'd chosen their beds; now was the time to lie in them. Shaking hands, nodding heads, they filed out silently, knowing that that could be the last time they saw their friends.

And each went out in the way he had lived. Two-faced Lindsey betrayed by his ally, Lorne quietly, regretfully and un-violently, Wesley with no regrets in the arms of the woman he loved, Gunn in the heart of the fight, Spike with no worries, fighting because he could, Illyria full of rage and a new-found concern and Angel… Angel wanted nothing but to show evil that no matter how big the resources or how powerful the influence, no one can control people who care.

None would know but months later the Hyperion was declared a historical landmark and a sign put up there.

'The Hyperion Hotel, Former Home to Angel Investigations 2000-2003. We Owe Them Our Lives. For they were the True Heroes of This World.'