Title: Missing You

TV Show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Author: Beloved Slayer

Rating: T

Summary: Takes place after the events of Beauty and the Beasts. Buffy is struggling to adjust to Angel's return. One shot.

Chapter One

"Buffy?" Angel calls out meekly, approaching me, his face caked with traces of dirt. I glanced into his eyes, preparing myself for any semblance of an attack. He kept still.

Until he drops to his knees, circling his arms around my own as if I was a child, as if I was his last life line. As if he hadn't seen me in years. He hadn't, I sadly realized. He tugged me towards him, and I didn't retaliate. His actions was all that I needed to know. It made me shiver. And it broke my heart.

My mouth opening, I gasped for a single ounce of breath, my head and heart pounding with rambling thoughts and emotions that I thought were long since buried. I was wrong.

They reached to the surface, and tears spilled from my eyes, both for myself, and to the immense relief that inexplicably, somehow, he had finally returned home.

I didn't know how long I stood there; it didn't matter, did it? Time stood frozen. I called his name, the one that was so familiar on my tongue. "Angel," I murmured, my voice filling with relief and love before crouching down to meet his embrace, pulling him into my arms, my head burying in the crook of his shoulders as I allowed my pent up emotions out into the open.

I felt him crying, whimpering, shivering in my small arms. It split my heart in two. It was the sounds that I had hoped never to hear from him. I soothed the man inside my fierce hold, my fingers caressing his hair gently, and then his face. "It's okay. You're okay. You're safe. I'll never let them hurt you, I promise." I placed a gentle sweep of kisses on his lips to comfort him.

A long road was ahead of us. But for now, this was where Angel belonged. In my arms. It was sanctuary. It was home.

"Lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day. And the strain of the primitive remained alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof were his...yet he retained his wildness and wiliness.

'And from the depths of the forest, a call still sounded.'