Buffy is still not mine

CHAPTER TWO

Although Buffy was shocked at Angel's reappearance into her world, she hid it well. Apart from her initial reaction, she thought, as she stood there, watching him with a carefully guarded expression, that she was doing a good job of keeping a lid on her astonishment. And the inner pain that his coming to her had dredged up.

Angel. The Betrayer. She had almost forgotten why she had given him that title, except perhaps that the years had clouded her memory and she preferred to blame him for what had happened to them, rather than admit to the truth. That he had been right, and she had been wrong. Buffy hated to be wrong, even now, after she had learned so many hard lessons. But they had caused each other too much pain. Right from the beginning, and here her memory was perfectly unclouded. How she had wanted Angel on sight, although she was a relatively inexperienced girl of sixteen. Sixteen! She'd thought she'd known it all then, though, hadn't she? Well, teenagers do, she reflected. They think they know it all, but know very little.

And she thought she had known Angel. A little. Right up to the time that he had told her he was a vampire, and destroyed all her schoolgirl illusions…

Was that the moment when she'd first thought of him as The Betrayer? She wondered suddenly. Or was it after they had made love, and he'd reverted once more to a bestial animal who tortured her emotions with red roses and dead bodies?

Buffy shook herself. She was going into territory she didn't want to explore again. Not yet. Maybe never. Instead she tried to concentrate on Angel, who stared at her expectantly, fear and something else glowing from his reddened, sunken eyes. Was that something love? No. Better not to think it. No love. Not for her. Never again.

"You want to feed from me?" she said, trying to keep her voice steady, tasting the strange, and, yes, repellent words on her own lips. Hesitantly he nodded.

Buffy laughed - the sound was cracked and unpleasant. Here was this… thing… who had left her alone, to die or not, as if he'd cared… This thing that looked like Hell, a rotting, putrescent apparition that was the shell of Angel, was asking to drink of her blood.

"No way."

"You said you'd help me." He sounded hurt, like a little boy. Vampires or not, Buffy thought, men never grew up. They always demanded something of her.

"Yeah. Before I knew you wanted to…" She shook her head, disgusted. "I'll help you, Angel, but not like… that. Haven't made a habit of being bitten by vampires, and I don't intend to start now."

"It's the only way you can help me. The only…" He stopped abruptly.

Buffy stared at him, unwilling to help him out. Strange, how hard her heart had become. She had always had time and emotional strength for her friends, when she'd had them, that was. Strange how the years had knocked that out of her. Strange and heart breaking, really.

"I wouldn't have bothered you, Buffy, believe me," Angel was saying. "You think I don't know how you hurt? How you suffer? You think I want you to drag up the past? I only want you to be happy, that's all I ever wanted… But I had to come. I told you, you're my only hope."

"And how does sucking my lifeblood help you?" She looked at him distastefully. Fury rose again and she wanted to stab the silver knife through his heart. She'd killed him once before; feeling the pain in her soul, she knew she could do it again. "Look at you, you disgusting leech. I've spent the best years of my life fighting things like you. Why the Hell should I change that? Why should I let you live?"

"Because we loved each other once, Buffy. Doesn't that count for anything?"

She wrenched her eyes from his, felt herself sucked down into the quicksand of her memories. Knew that yes, it counted for… for everything.

Their first kiss. Before she knew what he was… Even then, so young, she understood it was something special. His mouth, cool and hot at the same time. Soft and hard at the same time. Her senses dizzying, spiralling away from her, feeling herself sink into him. To know real desire for the first time in her short life. And then seeing him as he really was, seeing the devil that lived in that perfect body. Angelus. Face of an angel, soul of a demon.

"Maybe." She was hedging though. Unwilling to show the sudden depth of her emotion. He had her; she just refused to show it. Yet.

They'd tried to stop it of course. Angel had told her, and she had agreed - well, kind of - that a relationship between them wouldn't work. How could it? She was the Slayer, and he was a vampire. A vampire with a conscience, true, cursed to feel the pain of what he did. But still Undead. Still evil. But love, it had seemed, was an unstoppable force. They had grown closer and the inevitable had happened. One night of pure bliss, and then true horror as Angel lost his damned soul and reverted to type. Mourning for her love, yet accepting it was dead, she had finally sacrificed Angel to stop Hell from opening. The true tragedy of that was that Angel's soul had by then been restored.

The idea that he might return had been unthinkable, but he had returned. She still didn't understand how a soul could return from Hell in the same body, the body that had been destroyed. Giles, her Watcher, her guide in those relatively sane days, had tried to explain later, after she confessed that she'd been hiding him, but it hadn't sunk in. All she knew was that her love had come back to her.

So she had hidden it from her friends, knowing they would want him dead. She was especially afraid to tell Giles, knowing the torture that Angel had inflicted on him had left him cold with hate for the creature that was Angelus.

In solitary pain, she had kept Angel chained until he recovered from his ordeal in Hell. But finally, she had to confess. Angel was back.

She was right of course; they hated him for what he had done before. But Angel was back. Changed, but back. How could she reject him? And their love renewed itself as naturally as a flower bloomed. Until it became too difficult. Until he left her again.

Hating herself for it, hating to show weakness of any form, Buffy felt a sob rise in her throat, succeeded in strangling the sound before it was born.

"How will my blood help you?" she managed. "I'm human, same as anyone else. Any human blood would restore you. And I just bet you've had plenty of that."

But behind her caustic comments, she wondered. What in God's name had happened to him, to make him so weak, so… like a walking corpse?

"Buffy, put the knife down, sit down, and I'll tell you."

Angel wanted her to relax, but how could she relax with him here? She almost wished, for the briefest of moments, that James, her Watcher of the past five years, were here with her. And that, she thought, was certainly a horrific thought.

"I'm okay, thanks. This," she waved the knife, a little crazily, "is just here to remind you not to get carried away."

She heard him laugh; his parody of a face creased with what she thought might be amusement.

"Buffy, the way I'm feeling, a gust of wind could damage me, never mind a silver blade. Give me a break here."

Buffy bit her lip to prevent her smiling in return. She mustn't show him any encouragement. If he hurt her again… well, she might use the knife on someone much closer to home.

"Just tell me."

"All right. I've been… sick…

"You don't say." He shot a disgusted look at her flippancy and she shrugged. "Sorry."

"What you see before you is the result of a year's incarceration in a coffin…"

"A coffin? Oh per-lease… You've never been in a coffin in your… unlife…"

"Buffy… do you want to hear this?"

"I don't know. Do I?" Suddenly she was almost enjoying this; she felt as though she had the upper hand at last.

"I've been an outcast since I left you, Buffy. Hated by vampires, feared by humans." He closed his weeping eyes, obviously remembering. Buffy felt his pain, wanted to reach out and touch him, held herself back and aloof. "For a while, when I came back to you, I thought it could be good, but it wasn't… So I left… I've been hounded ever since. Wherever I went, those who knew I'd betrayed my own kind punished me. That was what I did, after all, Buffy, betrayed them by loving you, and by working with you. To cut an extremely long story short, I was trapped and bound and put in a sealed coffin under the earth. I dug my way out when the wood rotted away after a year. You can see for yourself what it did to me. Worse, all the power I had is gone. I've been trying, Buffy, to restore myself ever since, but human blood - normal human blood - is no good. So… I knew I had to find you, if you were still alive… and persuade you to help."

"Why my blood?" Buffy was dangerously close to giving way completely. His hurt, his desperation, was all too real and it touched her. She had, as he had pointed out, loved him once. Still did? No. She absolutely wasn't going down that route.

"You're The Slayer, Buffy. The Chosen One. Your blood is pure, human but better than human. If I drink from you, I know I'll recover. And there's something else…"

"What?" Her barriers came back up in a rush. "What more could you possibly want from me?"

"Not now." Angel was eyeing her speculatively, she saw. "If you agree, then I'll tell you. Otherwise, well, there's just no point."

Buffy turned her back. Perhaps it was foolish but she couldn't look at him anymore. What a strange life she led, where a creature from the pits of hell itself could request such a favour from her. How far removed from those out there who walked the streets, blithely unaware that such creatures existed at all, let alone walked among them. She hadn't asked herself this question in a long time but now she asked it of herself, and of any Higher Power that might be listening to her thoughts: Why me? What did I ever do to deserve this?

Of course, James - the saintly, must-do-everything-by-the-book - Harrison would say that she wasn't cursed, but blessed, but what did he know? He didn't live in her body, her heart, her soul. He only advised her. When she allowed it, that was. Still, once again she wished he were here now. Because she knew she was on the verge of doing something sublimely stupid.

"Hell wasn't as bad as this," Angel said from behind her and she turned quickly.

"You never really told me about that," Buffy said. "What it was really like…"

He grinned, a fearful sight.

"And I'm not about to," he replied. "Not yet. But believe me, it wasn't as bad as what I've become. And the way you're looking at me now." The grin disappeared. He covered his face with leprous hands, hands from which the skin peeled and gaping wounds erupted. "I kill, Buffy, I kill all the time and I hate myself, but I need to sustain this life, such as it is. If you can help me, I can stop. I stopped… before… I can stop now. Don't condemn me to live like this anymore."

"How did you find me?"

"Another long story. If you help, I'll tell you. No pressure, Buffy, I swear, but I don't have time for past histories. It was a shock, mind you, to find you gone from Sunnydale. How did that happen?"

"If I help, I'll tell you." Again that feeling of supreme power. "Let's just say that things were better that way."

"I heard that Giles was killed. How?"

Now she did sob. The mention of Giles' name was too much.

"I can't talk about it now." Five years and still the pain hadn't left her. Abated, but never gone, always ready to flood in again, like a high tide. "All my old life's finished, I had to give it up." She took a huge breath, stopped the sobs. "But you're back, Angel. So tell me, if I help you, are you going to leave again? Because if you are, you can forget it…"

"If you help me, Buffy, I'm afraid you're stuck with me. Because what I have in mind - well, I can't imagine anyone else who I'd want by my side."

"Yeah?" Was she really falling for that line? Yeah. She supposed she was. Besides, she was intrigued.

"Uh huh."

She met his eyes full on. Felt a welcome smirk form on her mouth, and she actually felt like the old Buffy for the first time in... She didn't know how long. She might regret this later - God knew, she probably would - but this was now, and now was all she had.

"All right," she agreed, full suddenly of helpless bravado. "Let's do it."

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