Title: Chance Meetings (second chapter of Guardians of Fate)

Feedback: Of course I want to know what you think otherwise I'd hide it in a folder on my computer! Kristi@allengames.com

Disclaimer: They belong to Joss. If they were mine I'd be nicer to them! At least most of the time.

Spoilers: Only if you have lived in a cave and not seen any of Angel or Buffy.

Distribution: If you want it just ask!

Author's notes: The centered offset quotes are quotes pulled from the shows. I didn't write them, I didn't think of them.

Angel got back into his rented car and drove around the narrow streets of Galway. Some of them were still cobblestone. He parked in one of the multi story parking garages and walked around the city. It was amazing to him how much had stayed the same in the last two hundred and fifty years. There were more changes then naught but he hadn't expected to recognize it at all.
He stopped still and peered in the darkness to his left. That was it. The alley where he'd died, or rather Liam had. The alley where Angelus had been born and a reign of terror some hundred years long had started. He shuddered as guilt racked his body and noticeably stooped his shoulders.
Angel had known coming back to Ireland would be hard. He hadn't been prepared to see the faces of those he'd killed in every shadow, every corner. He had borrowed a book on Galway history. It attributed the virtual annihilation of the entire village in 1753 to a plague.
He supposed Angelus had been as much a plague as anything was.

A few nights later he was surprised to find it was still there, at least what was left of it was still there. He parked the car down the hill and walked up the gentle slope. If he'd had a beating heart he was sure it would have stopped. His father's farm was in shambles. There were a few walls left he could see, a couple of doorways and the chimney. Where his mother's garden had once grown was now a tangle of weeds and wildflowers.
He tread slowly through what had been the front door. Ghosts from his past rushed all around him, tugging at his clothes, pulling him back in time. His body tingled and his gut wrenched.
"Liam! Are you an angel?"
"Aye, Kathy my love. Now let come in love."
She had stepped back and looked at him with such trust. "Hurry, come in. Father is in the study."
And he had come in and slaughtered them all, starting with his little sister, Katherine.
He pulled up short when he saw her there. He'd expected to see many ghosts in Ireland, but not her. She was standing outside underneath an ancient willow tree, near the family burial plot. Her hair was silver from the moonlight and her skin glowed like moonlit marble. The fog rolled around her. If she'd been wearing gossamer he would have thought her an Irish nymph. She seemed out of place among the ghosts of his victims. It hurt more to see her though. At least the others had been victims of Angelus. Most of the pain he'd caused her had been while he was ensouled.

-"You were born to hurt her. Have you learned nothing? As long as you are
alive"-

He walked toward her across crumbling paving stones that had once been a patio. He stumbled across the broken ledge of the boarded up well. She turned.
"Buffy-"

She closed her eyes. This couldn't be happening. He wasn't here. Yet he said her name as he always had, as if it were something reverent, sacred. "An-Angel?" She made it sound like an important question, instead of simply a name.
He didn't speak again but stepped closer, wary. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked down at her feet. She was wearing a crème Irish sweater and a leather jacket that looked achingly familiar. He'd had no idea she'd kept it all these years.

-"I mean you look cold." "Keep it. It looks better on you."-

She reached out first. He still half expected her to be a ghost and disappear before she touched him. She laid her little hand on his chest. "Well, this an unexpected visit."
"I-Wes-a book. I'm here to get a book." Angel finally said.
"Because Heaven knows Wes doesn't have enough books in Los Angeles." Buffy quipped.
Angel half smiled. She was nervous. She made quips when she was nervous.
"It's a special book, The Book of the Guardian. Last reports place it somewhere in Galway in the mid 18th century." He said. For some reason it helped to know that he had caught her unaware too. "What are you doing here?"
Buffy shrugged and broke eye contact. She returned it a moment later. "New slayer."
"You're here alone?"
"No. Xander is with me and for some reason, Andrew." She said.
"Andrew?" Angel said.
Buffy grinned. She could practically see Angel's hackles rise. "It's a long story. I don't even know why we keep him around, pity mostly, I think."
"Oh,"
An uncomfortable silence stretched into the night. Angel stuck his hands in his pockets and tried to keep from staring at her. It would have been easy to say something witty if he brain would get beyond processing 'She's beautiful.'
"Soooo, out for a little exercise, just happened by this way or is there dire danger and you knew just where to find me?" Buffy broke the silence.
He shook his head and glanced back at the ruins of the house. "This is-was- my father's house."
"Ohmigod, I didn't know. I just thought it was some pretty ruins."
"You're right. It is pretty. I never appreciated when I lived here. And the last time I saw it." he trailed off as the ghosts threatened to reclaim him.
She shivered in the cold. He removed his own suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled up at him. He could have sworn the sun was shining down on him.
"You keep giving me your clothes, you're not going to have any left."
"I didn't realize you had kept that." He nodded toward the leather jacket she was wearing.
She shrugged. "When we made our plans to go into the Hellmouth everyone took a few small, prized possessions. I took this, Mr. Gordy and our family photo album." A look of grief passed over her features. "There was so much more I wanted to bring. Things of Mom's. There just wasn't room. Giles left half his book collection behind.Dawnie."
"How is Dawn? I bet she's grown up since I last saw her." Angel asked.
Buffy looked up at him. "You remember her?"
Angel gave her a confused glance. "She chased me around your house with mirrors, fascinated because she couldn't see me in them. She's hard to forget."
A memory clicked. She remembered Dawn doing that. She remembered Dawn bursting into her room and finding Angel there. She remembered Dawn threatening to tell Mom that Angel was in her room, again. Before Angel had mentioned it, she didn't have a single memory of Dawn and Angel together.
"Oh, yeah, tired I guess. I'd forgotten she used to do that." Buffy scrambled. "Dawn is handling everything really well, better then I've given her credit for. She's with Giles. She wants to be a watcher and I think she'll be really good at it. She won't make some of the mistakes a lot of watchers make because she knows how hard being a slayer is."
Angel smiled at her. She glowed with pride when she talked about Dawn. Buffy rubbed her arms as they walked through the ruins.
"Do you want to go somewhere? My car is just down the hill." He said. "You just look cold."
"Yeah. Somewhere inside, right?"
Angel grinned at her. "Yes. I've got a house I'm staying in a little ways from here."

Once they were inside confined walls, he wasn't sure it had been such a good idea to put both of them in the same room. His body and soul screamed out for him to touch her. His blood would quit boiling and his head would stop aching if he could just kiss her. He knew that wasn't true though. They couldn't kiss without it growing into more, and quickly.

-"Let me worry about the neediness. I can handle it"-

-"I told you, you better go"-

-"I'm sorry"-

Instead he busied himself making a fire. Buffy inched closer to it as the flames started. He looked over at her. "I don't have much in the house. I wasn't planning on visitors or I'd have bought things. I think there's some coffee or tea, but no milk or sugar." He said apologetically.
"And hey, it's not really tea without milk. It's okay, really. I'm not thirsty."
That was a lie, she thought. Every time she looked at him her mouth went dry. Had he always been this beautiful? When she had seen him so briefly before the battle with the first, she hadn't had time to concentrate, to take it all in it had been such a shock to see him. A nice shock, but a shock.
Buffy backed away from the fire and sat down on the couch. Angel perched on the opposite end.
"Tell me what you've been doing. I've enjoyed the postcards but you never said much."
"It's a teeny space to write in?" She offered. "I've been busy, or we have. Once the dust settled, literally, we had to find some place to put these girls. We also had a lot more find. Wood, my old boss, his mom was a slayer, another long story, anyway the guy who raised him left him some kind of ranch in San Bernardino. It has this big house with lots of room. We moved the girls in there. It was home base for a little while."
Angel tried to disguise the hurt look that came over his face. She'd been that close and hadn't felt she could come to him. He waited to hear her out though.
"Giles and Willow found this spell that the council used to help them find potentials. They altered it a little bit and used it. Our first new slayer was in Switzerland. I think I sent you a post card from there. Then we went to England, which was Giles Heaven and Rome. Giles and Willow are in the middle of something right now, so when we found a new slayer here, they sent me and Xander."
"I have a hotel, Buffy, and an evil law firm. I could have provided room for everyone." Angel said.
"You have a what and a what?" She looked at him. Apparently he had begun to speak a foreign language mid sentence because there was no other explanation for what she'd heard.
He laughed. It felt good. "You've got your long stories I have mine. When my old office blew up I bought an old hotel. We had the investigation business there for a couple of years. This evil law firm that represents every evil being on this planet has been on my tail since I moved to LA. They decided I was more trouble then I was worth and pulled up their roots, leaving me their building and all their resources. So now I run a law firm."
"Oookay, that's going to take me a little while to process, like the next twenty years or so."
"Did Faith make it through the battle?"
"Yeah. After the apocalypse Willow and I decided she'd sort of payed her debt so Giles called in some favors with who knows who and Faith's record doesn't exist anymore. She and Wood live in San Bernardino on the ranch with around 15 girls now. All slayers, thanks to Willow's nifty spell. She's in a good place. You'd be proud of her." Buffy glanced over at Angel.
He nodded. "And everyone else?"
"Like I said Xander is here with me. Anya." Buffy's face darkened and she pulled into herself. "She didn't make it through the battle. We didn't, there wasn't time to get the body. But, I sort of learned in Heaven the body really isn't the important part anyhow."
Angel reached out and wiped the tears that had gathered on her cheeks. "It's the soul that counts."
Buffy nodded, took a deep breathe and continued. "Giles, Willow and Dawn are busy getting things together for a new Watchers Council, of sorts. It won't be anything like the old one. Giles is going to be in charge. Slayers are never going to be pushed off into some flea bag hotel and then taken out when trouble comes along like a sword or gun. They forgot we're people too, and most of us really young girls when we first start. I was lucky, but most of the girls before me, and after, weren't."
"You're doing a good thing then Buffy. You've got a mission and you're doing something that needs to be done. Wes would be fascinated by the spell Willow used to make all the potentials slayers. I can't even imagine the power it must have required."
"Willow kicked butt. She really came through when I needed her. Now, I don't know if it was the right thing to do. I mean, because I am a slayer I missed out on a lot of things. I grew up fast. I don't get the luxury of shutting my eyes against the things that go bump in the night. I don't know if it was right for me to make these girls face that."
"It will be different for them Buffy. They aren't the one and only. Neither are you anymore." The last he said quietly.
"Does that make me somehow less of something in your eyes?" Buffy asked defensively.
Angel just looked up at her. His chocolate brown eyes shown with adoration. He always could make her feel like she was the only one in the world. "It wasn't because you are a slayer that I fell in love with you. It's your heart, your soul. Those are unique to you, not part of the slayer package."
She let out the breath she'd been holding and slumped back against the couch. "I know. I'm just being, I don't know. It's hard."
His heart ached for her in a way only she had ever been able to make it ache. It made him forget he was a dead thing with a dead heart.
"So tell me about this evil law firm your running now."