Chapter Eleven

For the sixth time that day (yes, he counted), Gunn punched Angel and the memory that had been playing out faded back into obscurity, another one already in its place. Angel leaned over the deep red couch that had been in his Sunnydale mansion and massaged his now-aching jaw.

"Excellent!" Wesley said once he realized where they were. "Angel, you wouldn't have any peat moss here, would you?"

"No," Angel said, "but there might be some in that swamp by the fireplace…" he pointed, and Wesley rushed over to the edge of the murky bog, where a dark, damp tree wound its way up through the ghost-like chimney and a thick fog was beginning to form on top of the water.

"How many more ingredients do you need, Wesley?" Fred asked eagerly, also bouncing over to the bog and plopping down next to the water as if next to a picnic basket that contained the most delicious chocolate cake she'd ever tasted. Though all were glad that Wesley had found a way to get the ingredients he needed, Fred was the most outwardly excited—a little overly so. Wesley guessed that it was her way of coping with being back in Pylea, if briefly; her inner pendulum swung to the other extreme much more quickly than the rest of theirs did. He wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing or not, but he didn't have much time to think about it now.

"Only a solid piece of silver," Wesley replied.

"I have a ring," Cordelia offered, holding up her hand to display it. In fact, she wore several rings, but only one of them was pure silver (and her father had paid for it, so she didn't really mind losing it—especially if it meant getting out of Angel's past for good).

"It's too small," Wesley said. "It has to conduct a lot of energy to channel 250 years' worth of memories back into Angel." Pockets now bulging with peat moss, he looked over at Angel, who was still leaning against the back of the couch. "Would you have anything here that—"

But before Wesley could finish, the scenery shifted yet again and Angel disappeared behind an old wooden wall. Wesley caught a glint of something sharply evil in Angel's eye just before the wall separated them, and Wesley stood quickly and positioned himself in front of Fred.

"That's it! We're putting a leash on him!" Cordy cried in complete exasperation. They were now in the hallway of an old inn—not that she cared where they were anymore—the fires of hell ominously eating away at the wood at one end of the hall. "Wesley, we're never going to get anywhere if the guy we need to stuff these memories back into isn't even here…Physically or mentally." She added in a mutter. "Isn't there anyway to do the spell without the ingredients and without Angel?" She asked.

"Without the ingredients: maybe. Except for the silver; that's critical. And Angel absolutely must be a part of it."

"Then we'd better snap him out of it…Again." Gunn said. "Any idea which of these doors—"

A sudden thud and crash in the room on the other side of the nearest door to Gunn made them jump. Voices shouted, one screamed, and a few laughed.

"Oh. Never mind," Gunn muttered. Being the designated Get-Angel-Out-Of-A-Memory-By-Punching-Him puncher, he positioned himself in front of the door, tightening his sore fist. It wasn't like his knuckles were made of steel, he thought begrudgingly, even though the violence was a bit cathartic. Gunn stretched out his free hand and grabbed the doorknob as though his task were as routine as brewing the morning coffee—which it almost was.

"Be careful," Wesley said.

"Yeah, yeah," Gunn replied. He took a breath, psyching himself up, and burst through the door. Gunn would never tell them what he saw, though they could hear him choke back the vomit, and a rank smell made them all nauseas before the door slammed shut behind him. A few minutes later, the scene shifted again—this time to a dark room—Angel massaged yet another part of his jaw, and the group huddled close together in the new darkness, trying to figure out where they were now.

"Could you stop going for the jaw, Gunn?" Angel said in exasperation.

"You want me to hit somewhere lower, I'd be happy to oblige," Gunn replied with as much ice as he could muster, his eyes still wide and horrified as he leaned against the wall for support. "I'll even use my foot instead of my fist."

Angel glared at him.

No one said anything for a few minutes, all worn down almost to capacity and trying to gather themselves up again. Except for Fred, that is, who was searching their surroundings for something large and silver with an intense kind of fervor. She was tugging on the silver handle of an old blue police box when Angel grabbed her hand.

"Fred…Fred, don't…No really Fred, that's not going to be big enough." Angel gently but firmly pulled her away from the box, eying it apprehensively as he took Fred to sit on a bench that was made of absolutely no metal.

Cordelia stared at the floor, arms crossed tightly against her stomach, not seeing either the balmy corridor to her right or the evergreen blizzard to her left, and her head pounding and completely done with this whole ordeal. She breathed in deeply and out again, but the technique wasn't working as well as it used to. Cordelia was just thinking about how didn't want to think about what all the stress was doing to her skin, when she realized that the floor looked slightly familiar. She didn't often look at the ground when she walked, but you couldn't tread those tiles for four very memorable years and not recognize them.

Cordelia jumped as Jenny Calendar ran suddenly past her, breathing hard gasps of air that sounded painful, and stumbling as she glanced behind her. Cordy's stomach turned over and she swallowed against the rising bile. She knew exactly which memory this was. She hadn't been present for this one, but they all had imagined it enough times with varying degrees of guilt, horror, and grief for her to be reasonably sure.

Miss Calendar looked forward again and screamed in surprise as she ran into Angelus' waiting arms. He clamped his hand over Miss Calendar's mouth.

"Sorry, Jenny. This is where you get off."

Cordy wanted to close her eyes, but she watched anyway. When Angelus snapped Jenny's neck and let her fall to his feet, the loud, sinewy crack mirrored something inside Cordy, and she finally snapped, too.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Cordelia marched over to Angelus and just as he was remarking how he never got tired of doing that, Cordy pulled back and decked him as hard as she could. He stumbled away, trying to regain his balance. Somewhere behind Cordy, she heard Gunn mutter in surprise and slight admiration, "Damn…" Jenny faded away and as Angel looked up, holding his jaw where she had hit him.

She did not apologize. All the anger she had been bottling since the previous night boiled to the surface. Everything else seemed to fade away into the background. It was all wall paint. Breathing heavily with rage, she glared at him standing there, crouched over and recovering from the shock of her blow.

"You really did it. You killed her." She seethed.

"Yeah, I killed her. You know that." Angel straightened up, still massaging his jaw, staring at her bewilderedly. "Ow."

"Do you even care?"

Angel's eyes narrowed. "Of course I care. I just don't get why you're so mad at me now, for this. That was years ago and, in case you've forgotten, we're in the middle of a crisis here."

"You don't see how I'm mad at you? Hm, let's think, Angel, what could possibly have happened between us to make me mad at you?"

"Jenny Calendar had nothing to do with last night," Angel's voice rose with his temper and he shoved a little harder than he normally would have against a version of himself that had drunkenly fallen into him. The scene had shifted to a noisy Irish pub, filled with out-of-place and out-of-time memory fragments that, for the first time, no one noticed.

"She has everything to do with last night! You were a friend, and then you were suddenly evil without any warning whatsoever, and you hurt the people who cared about you. That's what last night is all about, Angel. It's about you balancing between the guy who always feels the consequences of his actions and the guy who doesn't even know what 'consequence' means. It's about you being predictable and good and safe when you have a soul and being evil and nasty and dangerous when you don't. But most of all," she took a deep breath, "it's about you scaring the hell out of me when I thought you couldn't."

Silence fell over the group as Cordy paused to take a few breaths. She hadn't quite known that the last part was true, but it made perfect sense. No one behind her spoke. Cigarette smoke curled past her nose, but she hardly noticed. Angel stared at her, his face expressionless, though she knew he was processing her words. Somewhat calmed, she continued.

"I know you have a dark side, Angel. You're a vampire. I have every reason to be afraid of you. We all do. Even with your soul, if you want to you can turn on us at any moment and there's really nothing we can do about it. We deal with it by convincing ourselves there's nothing to be afraid of at all. That's worked really well for me these past five years. No soul equals terror; soul equals friend. But what happened last night completely shattered that nice little paradigm. You want to know why? Because there wasn't supposed to be a middle ground. You hurt me when you went dark and fired us, Angel, but before last night I was never afraid of you."

Angel stared intently at her. "So you're mad because I gave you a reason to fear me? Cordy, you should—"

Cordy shook her head. "Oh, no. Don't give me that 'you should be afraid of me because I'm a bad, bad demon with a dark past' crap. I know there are parts of you to fear Angel; I've known that ever since you tried to have that blue guy burn us all up. What keeps us friends now is that I'm not afraid of you. Or at least, that I know when not to be afraid of you. But suddenly last night I didn't know. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to deal with it."

Angel nodded silently and hesitated. "Is there anything I can do to help?" He asked.

"Just…give me time."

Angel nodded again and silence fell between them. After a few moments, Wesley ventured cautiously, "Cordelia?"

She turned, "I know, Wes. Let's get out of here. Something metal right?"

Wesley nodded. "Silver, specifically. It's molecular structure is such that –" but he stopped, looking over Cordelia's shoulder in speechless horror.

"I have something."

Cordelia was always amazed at how easy it was to tell Angel from Angelus. Her body felt the same horror that Wesley showed just by hearing him so close behind her. It was the amusement in his voice, like she was just about to become the butt of a cruel joke; a level of snide that even Cordelia was better at than Angel. She clenched her fist. Sure, she had gotten a lot off of her chest, but punching Angelus out of Angel had been nearly as therapeutic – if not more so.

Cordelia was also amazed at how the speed of thought surpasses time, and in less than a second, she realized some very important things. She realized that something was wrong: while the rowdy sounds of a pub barraged her from behind, the Sunnydale school had shifted back to the Sunnydale mansion. But this time she saw the stone statue that was slowly opening its mouth, hellfire and damnation swirling with screams inside it, and she saw the slow-motion terror on the other's faces as they ran toward her. She remembered, from some dusty, uncovered part of her mind, a brief conversation with Xander Harris about how Buffy and Angelus' final battle had been with swords, and it rang painfully in her head. And she realized that she knew she wouldn't have time to duck before Angelus swung at her.

Her eyes closed reflexively and her arms moved to protect herself; but before they were even halfway up, a sickeningly wet sound of the sword hitting flesh made everyone stop and cringe.

But the sword hadn't hit her.

She cracked her eyes open and turned. There were two versions of Angel instead of one standing behind her. Angelus pushed at the sword already lodged in the other man's collarbone, pure hatred in his eyes. Liam looked blurrily at the sword and the blood pouring from his wound like it hadn't quite registered through his inebriated fog. Angelus pulled the sword out and prepared to slice his human half's head clean off this time. And then Gunn's fist slammed into Angel's head for the last time that night.

Angel stumbled away and dropped the sword, which clanged on the stone floor. The human memory gave Gunn an exaggerated nod of thanks, swayed on his feet and collapsed.

Fred was the first to move. She quietly made her way to the sword and timidly picked it up; blood slid down the blade in a tiny stream and dripped off the point. Gunn knelt next to the dying Liam and turned to look at Wesley. "What do we do?" he asked.

"I'm not sure there's anything we can do," Wesley stammered, waving at the quickly growing pool of blood.

"We do the spell," Angel said, standing up and for once ignoring his throbbing jaw. He looked at his past self with an unreadable expression. "Put him back in my head. We have all the pieces." He made a point not to look at the sword in Fred's hands.

Wesley nodded, swallowed, and without further hesitation or thought, set to work drawing a hasty circle on the ground with the fresh blood. "Fred, Gunn, Cordelia? I'll need the ingredients you have."

The others moved off, searching their pockets for the various ingredients that Wesley had given them to carry and leaving Angel standing with himself and a feeling of sick fascination. He cautiously approached Liam, kneeling down and taking the place at his side that Gunn had left. So many emotions ran through him: relief, jealousy, anger, confusion…it made him feel lightheaded.

He stared down at his past self and tried to make sense of everything. He couldn't pretend this wasn't real; that his human self was not dying in front of him and that he had not just sacrificed himself without hesitation. Clearly, it was the fact that this was real that they were trying so desperately to fix. But it had never been quite as real to him as it was now, and he wasn't sure why. Angel cocked his head and watched the life spurt out of Liam.

"Why?" He asked finally, quiet enough so that the others wouldn't hear him.

Liam stared at him; his breath gurgled. Wesley called out for Angel to come and stand in the circle, but Angel didn't move.

"Because…" Liam coughed out a few mouthfuls of blood. He looked Angel in the eye and they stared at each other for a moment. "Because I'm not as bad as you think I am." He gave Angel a drunken smile. "Either of you."

"Angel!"

He glanced at the others, and then turned back at Liam. He didn't smile in return; but for himself he didn't really think he needed to. He stood.

"You might be right," Angel said, and walked toward his friends, leaving his human self like he had always remembered him: dying.