A/N: I just rewatched "Not Fade Away" and realized I had forgotten that Angel signed away his shanshu. I had to rewrite my whole personal post-NFA Buffyverse. This is a small glimpse of that.
He can never decide if it is a gift from the Powers or a curse; his unlife, handed back, after the alley where it was due in full, and paid. Not his life, not his shanshu, but something less and more. An eternity. Time enough to watch Spike step wondering into the sun, tilt his head back and laugh. Time enough to watch him slow and wither and taste and bounce fat grandchildren on his knee. Time enough to catch the look, a hundred thousand times, the triumph and the pity. Time enough to tell the truth, but he never does.
Buffy calls him on it, after the funeral. She had someone bring her a chair, because she gets tired now, but they had met beside too many graves for her to just go home. Her eyes are still bright, and she looks up at him in the dusk and says, "One of the Watchers found the contract. Accidentally. He brought it to me."
He doesn't deny. He wants to crouch down beside her and bury his head in her lap, eyes closed. She smells the same as she always did.
"You gave it up," she says, "Maybe it was meant to be yours."
He doesn't affirm. He stands still, while she sighs, a motion of her whole bent and slender body. "He never said anything, but he worried, he wondered. I wondered too. It was good you didn't tell him."
He thinks of all the times he's given up humanity, so that they could arrive at this day, this summer evening where she is too frail to stand and he is still tall and straight and strong. She reaches up and takes his hand. "We've had a good life anyway," she says.
"We are still having a good life," he agrees. She nods and lets him help her up, one hand on the small of her back. She leans into him, even smaller than she used to be, a tiny thing he could cradle in the crook of an arm. She asks him about dinner. They walk slowly out of the graveyard, their steps in synchrony.
