oooooooooooooo Here's the new chapter. Review and enjoy.
Now that Buffy knew she and Angel were really going to talk, a wave of emotions flooded her.
She had so much more to say to him than she had thought before.
"I'll answer you, I promise, but there are some things I want to say first," Buffy told Angel, leading him onto her favourite path.
"Okay," Angel answered.
"I'm probably gonna say some things that you're gonna feel bad about, but I swear, that's not what I want. It's just stuff I need to say."
Angel nodded uneasily.
"I'm not gonna ask if you know how much I love you, because I'm sure you do... I loved you from the second you first kissed me, before even. A part of me even loved you when you were Angelus. I don't know if you remember, but near the beginning of when you were bad, I was patrolling one night and you tracked me down... I thought you were there to fight me as usual, apparently not.
"You told me to come over to your side, said that we'd be together again, if I'd just let you turn me. And you know what, for a few minutes, a part of me, not the part that won out, but still a little part, wanted to say yes to you... So I loved you for awhile even when you were bad. I loved you when I killed you," Buffy said, now tearing up at that memory. "I loved you so much," she said, sitting down on a bench.
"Hey. Don't cry about that," Angel gently told her. "You did what you had to do. You couldn't have risked the whole world for me."
"I almost did, though. For a few seconds the rest of the world didn't matter, because you were my world. How was it fair that you finally came back, that you were good, mine again, and that it would have to be me to send you away? It wasn't fair, but I did it.
"I killed you, and I left Sunnydale... I didn't contact anyone. Nobody heard from me for months. I was hiding. I was trying to forget what I did, but I couldn't because I saw you wherever I went... I was pathetic, I was nobody. I didn't Slay, but finally I did go back to Sunnydale.
"And that was hard, because I had to accept that you were gone. I tried to move on, I met that nice guy, Scott, and then what happened? You came back... I don't know if you can ever understand what was going on in my mind. It was crazy. I had to force myself to keep my distance from you. I tried to be cold with you. I tried to forget my feelings. I needed to control myself. A part of me needed to stay away from you because I remembered that it was my fault you turned evil in the first place.
"It was pretty much my own fault that I had to kill you... But I couldn't stay away for long. How was I supposed to stay away from you when we were in the same small town? How was I supposed to forget you, when I didn't want to? How was I really supposed to move on knowing that you still loved me and that I had never stopped loving you?
"So we got back together, and I felt good again. Inevitably though, something had to happen. You decided to break up with me. I remember telling you that I wanted my life to be with you, and you said that you didn't. You broke my heart... Later on I figured out that you didn't mean that you didn't want to be with me. You just meant that you didn't want me to be with you. And that was a hard difference to figure out.
"You wanted the best for me, I understood that eventually. But I still wanted you. It wasn't fair for you to leave just because you thought you weren't good for me. I was mad... And then I remember Faith shooting you with the arrow, when she was all psycho. Angel, I was so scared that you were gonna die, that you would really go away, and that I'd never see you again. The gang told me that the blood of a Slayer was the only way to cure you. I was going to kill Faith for you. I was going to kill her so that you wouldn't die.
"That didn't work out, so what did I decide to do? I decided that you were going to take my blood, because there was absolutely no way that I would let you die. It's scary to think of a world that you're not in. So I let you drink me, I trusted that you wouldn't drain me and kill me. If ever there was any doubt that I loved you or you loved me, that erased it all. I put my life in your hands and you protected it.
"You fought against your nature for me... I just couldn't believe that after something like that had happened between us, something that intimate, you could still want to leave. But you did leave me. I know you thought it was all for my own good, but that didn't help... I've grown up a lot since then, but you screwed me up, Angel.
"You made me love you so much, and then you were just gone. Out of my life within the blink of an eye... Would you do that again? Would you leave me again?" Buffy asked Angel.
"No," he answered her.
"No more deciding what's good for me?"
"No," he said again. "I gave up on that. Who am I to make decisions for you, especially after seeing that I'd made the wrong one? I gave up on listening to people say that we were doomed from the beginning. Nobody can know that, they're not us. So if you tell me that you meant what you said back in L.A, I swear, the only way I'm leaving you is if you send me away. Nothing and nobody but you can ever make me leave. Nobody else is gonna tell me what to do."
"Good," Buffy said. "...Because I meant every word that I said in L.A."
A loud crash-like noise was heard, just after Buffy said those words.
"What the hell is going on?" Angel asked.
"I have no idea, but we better get back to the house. That crash sounds like it came from that direction."
Buffy and Angel ran back to the house as fast as they could.
Buffy couldn't believe her eyes.
Her house was on fire. And the gang was still inside.