*** AUTHOR'S NOTE ***
And we have made it! Are you excited? I'm excited and I know what's going to happen :P Yeah, I have on occasion been called weird or crazy or something along those lines. Actually, I call myself weird at least three times a day :P Weird, I know. Anyway, please enjoy this one. This is the second last episode of the first Angel season. Oh my god, I've come so far :P So have you guys though, putting up with my writing for the past however long it's been. Anyway, I'll stop blabbering now. This one is again in a different format. I can't help it, I have to try to new things or I get bored. Don't be confused. This is in first person from Mirany's perspective which should become clear pretty much straight away, but just to make sure, I'm telling you now. The next one may possibly be in first person too, it might not. I'll see how this one goes. So enjoy and review at the end :D
"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George Patton
Yeah, I had been prepared for this day for a long time, but I never expected it to be quite the way it was. I'm sorta sad that I'm surprised. I should have seen it coming. I know perfectly well that my plans never work quite the way they should, in fact, they rarely work at all. I suppose I was just hoping. Hoping that it wouldn't turn out to be quite the mess it became. But it's too late to change it now.
...
"Mirany, please tell me that you did not spend the night drinking," said Angel.
"I did not spend the night drinking," I said, surpressing a hiccup.
Angel sighed.
"How I ever expected you to do something sensible the night before we could all be blown up is beyond me," he muttered to himself. "Do you have any idea of the importance of today?"
"Yes Angel," I said through gritted teeth. "And I had one drink. I don't have a hangover and you should remove your face from my personnal space bubble right now before I make the plan much more difficult to pull off. Having a man down really puts a dent in it."
Angel straightened up and tossed my keys at me.
"You ready?" he asked.
At the time, I thought I was.
...
"So we're all clear on what we're doing?" I asked.
"You, Connor and Angel are going to try to disarm the first bomb after we finish this meeting," said Cordelia tonelessly. I may have gone over it one too many times. "You'll have until two pm. Wesley and I will stay here and try to disarm or dismantle the second bomb. If your bomb goes off then he have three hours to either disarm it or get out of town, depending on whether things are looking bleak or not. We don't need it lecutred to us another time. Even I can remember it."
"Good," I said, bouncing up and down nervously on the balls of my feet. "And if we call you..."
"We'll leave town right away," said Wesley. "You'll call if there's absolutely no way that you can do anything about the bomb and it'll be safer if we all just leave. You'll also call, if possible, if you've been caught by any of Lilah's thugs."
I caught the message by his slightly annoyed tone.
"I'm getting paranoid aren't I?" I asked.
"Only in the literal sense," said Angel. "We'll leave in half an hour, that gives us three hours. Don't want to risk being there for too long, we'll raise too much suspicion from Lilah."
"Right," I said. "Well, see you in half an hour."
I all but dashed from the lobby and out into the street, walking along it aimlessly, turning a pocket knife over in my fingers.
"Is that plan Q?"
I turned to look up at Connor.
"No," I said, pulling a hunting knife from my ankle. "This is plan Q."
Connor whistled impressively at the long weapon.
"You ready?" I asked, putting the knife back.
"I don't know," said Connor. "I guess. Fingers crossed we come out of this alive."
"Your fingers are wasted on me," I said. "Who am I kidding? I can't kill Lilah. Plan R, when plan Q fails, is use the knife on me."
"Mirany, stop putting a dampener on this," said Connor, brushing my hair back behind my ear. "You have..."
He counted on his fingers.
"...16 more plans before anyone dying comes into the picture."
"Yeah, but none of them are very fool hardy," I said.
"Mirany, it'll be fine," said Connor, wrapping his arms around my waist and drawing me closer into him. "Trust me. You'll be fine. And there's no way on earth that you'll go through with plan R anyway. You love yourself too much."
I grinned.
"It's as if you know me," I said.
...
"I'm not going up there," I said, looking apprehensively at the rickety old ladder that the store manager had let Angel use. "I don't care whether you two will be standing here to catch me if it collapses, you are not getting me up that thing. I don't need to die until later today."
"You're not going to die Mirany," said Connor.
"I am if I get on that ladder," I said.
"What? You scared?" asked Angel.
I knew he was challenging me, knew I should just ignore him and continue to press my point, but I couldn't help myself. I don't take taunting well.
"Fine," I said, glaring at him. "I'll go up there. It's not as if you'd have the brains to disable that thing anyway."
"It's true I don't have Wesley talking in my ear," said Angel, gesturing at the ear bud I was wearing.
"That's not Wesley doofus," I snapped. "I recorded the instructions to my ipod last night so I wouldn't have to memorise them."
"You did something smart? Did it make your brain explode or something?" asked Angel. "This is big news. I could call in..."
"I would shut up now if I were you dad," said Connor pointedly.
Angel caught a glance at my expression and decided to take Connor's warning at heed.
"Go on then," he said, gesturing at the ladder. "Start climbing."
I did, but at a very slow pace which Angel scoffed at. I heard Connor whack him and wanted to look but I didn't dare mvoe any more than I had to on this thing. When I reached the top of the ladder I was almost face to...explosives with the bomb.
"Tweezers," I muttered and Connor tossed the tweezers at me.
I began to sort through the many different wires, carefully parting them while making sure that they stayed connected to whatever they were connected to. I didn't want to risk the thing going off early and taking my face off with it. My ipod was mumbling mixed up instructions in my ear and I sighed. Okay, so I had lied to Angel. I'd had a few last night. The problem was that now I had no clue which of the wires I was supposed to snip or reconnect.
"Taking your time there Mirany," said Angel pointedly.
"I may have forgotten to put in how to figure out which wires go where," I said, biting my lip.
Angel and Connor groaned.
"What do we do now?" asked Connor.
"Don't worry I'll figure it out," I said. "It'll just take some time."
"Time we don't have," said Angel. "We've got two hours and no way can you figure that out in time. I'm calling Wesley."
"You're giving up? Just like that?" I asked. "What sort of a man are you?"
"A sensible one," said Angel, pulling out his phone. "Damn it!"
"Hmm, a sensible man who didn't charge his phone," said Connor, sounding amused as he looked over Angel's shoulder. "There goes that plan."
"You two have phones as well," said Angel. "Hand it over Connor."
"I think Mirany should get a chance," said Connor. "And you do give up way too quickly."
"Give me an hour," I said. "If I haven't done it by then, we'll call Wes and Cordelia."
...
An hour and a half of frustrated thinking later, I still hadn't done it. I suppose it was to be expected. I'm good at the reading of instructions, but memorizing them...not so good. Angel was getting more and more impatient.
"Just stop Mirany," he said. "At least we'll still have some time to get out of the place."
"I'm not leaving. I'm not giving up," I said. "What about the rest of the people out there? The people that don't know something big's about to happen. They're going to die."
"Mirany, if you don't stop you'll still be up there when it blows you up," said Connor.
"At least I won't have to deal with you ever again," said Angel.
"You'd go to hell too," I said pointedly.
"True. Then I'd have to spend the rest of eternity with you...from now on it is my sole duty to make sure that only one of us dies at any one time," said Angel.
"I feel so loved," I said sarcastically.
"Mirany, stop," said Angel. "We ned to get out of here. I'm calling Wes."
"I'm not going," I said firmly. "I'm going to help everyone else. You two go. Get Wesley and Cordelia and get out."
"Mirany this is stupid," said Angel angrily. "You can't stop this and unfortunately you can't save those people."
"They are innocent people going about their lives," I said. "I'm not just going to let them all die!"
"Guys..." started Connor.
"Mirany, if you leave then Lilah must stop," said Angel. "You don't know that what she said was true when you asked her why. It's far more likely that she's doing this for you. If you get out then might decide to stop."
"I know Lilah and she wouldn't stop," I said. "Even if I was gone. I'm staying right here."
"You two really should..." Connro tried.
"You're coming with us," Angel growled. "Sometimes the best thing for everyone is just to leave."
"I'm not you," I snarled, jumping down from the ladder and sizing up to him. "I don't leave when things get too messy. I'm staying here and I'm going to try to help. If LA's going to go up in flames then god damn it, I'm going with it!"
The silence that followed seemed to stretch on for hours. I was glaring at Angel defiantly as he stared at me in shock. It was Connor who finally broke the silence.
"We're almost out of time," he said. "We don't have time to run anymore. Call Wes if you want dad but we have no choice now. We need to stay and try to get as many people away from here as possible."
"How do we do that?" asked Angel. "Run around screaming 'we're all going to die' or something? Somehow I don't think that'll work."
"Do whatever you have to do," I said. "Just get people out. How long do we have?"
"Ten minutes," said Connor.
"Just tell people to run. Tell them to run as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Get them out."
The next few few minutes we spent trying as hard as we could to get people to leave, and I have to say we got a fair few people away, but there were the few that still wouldn't listen, even when they were shown the bomb. It didn't surprise me. I would have thought it was just a trick or something too if I hadn't known about it. Still, there were a good number of people still walking around the place minutes before the bomb was due to go off.
"We can't get them all out," said Connor. "It's too hard, they don't believe us."
"We can't do any more," said Angel. "This is it. If they're not gone then too bad. We've got two minutes. Do you think maybe it's time for us to run?"
The moment he said that we were off. It's amazing how fast you can run when pumped with adreniline, but that wasn't really helpful. I felt sluggish, like everything was in slow motion or something and when I tried to push through this feeling, I couldn't. I checked my watch. One minute. I pumped my legs as hard and fast as I could, but it wasn't fast enough. Ten, nine, eight, seven...We all stopped. There was no point. We'd never get out of the blast radius in time. Four, three, two, one.
BOOM!
Angel, Connor and I were all thrown off our feet as the bomb blew up. There was stuff flying everywhere, fire climbing high into the sky and people screaming. That was the last thing I knew before the ground and blackness hit me.
