Second Edition
by
Disclaimer: Not mine. No claims. BtVS is Joss Whedon's baby, and apparently a 'David Greenwalt' had something to do with Angel. I swear, I'm not claiming!
Summary: A newly released Faith and a grieving Angel seek to comfort each other the only way they know how: Touch. Set summer post- BtVS S5 & AtS S2.
Rating: Hard R
Dark and darker. It looks different than blond and brown, the vampire muses.
Looking down, he smiles a little as his brunette beauty moans under him, then moves his hips to better satisfy her. Cordelia would ask him how he can think at a time like this. Except that he never plans for Cordelia to know about this night.
He knows that his soul could be in jeopardy. But he isn't worried. If with Darla his misery was complete, now his pain is eternal, just as is his life. There's no danger here for Angel. His soul is staying where it belongs, no matter what he does with the living Slayer, tonight.
There's nothing left in this world that could make him happy enough to lose his most precious gift again.
Unless he can bring Buffy back.
The Slayer beneath him, he knows was freed by the council, not without a few strings being pulled. He knows why, too. With Buffy's death, no new Slayer was called, and the world depended on the girl, only barely an adult, who was, coincidentally, locked up in jail.
The demons of LA had rejoiced. That is, until Angel took after them, seeking to lose some of his pain in theirs. He couldn't inflict his internal scars on them, so he settled for giving them markings to match the ones on the surface of his pale skin. Torture was a skill he hadn't practiced since his time as Angelus, and he doesn't exactly torture his victims now, but they don't die quite as quickly or painlessly as they used to.
It's sinking in now, the fact that though he has a Slayer wriggling under him, she will never be his Buffy, and the tears are flowing faster. He's been weeping this whole time, slow, deliberate tears of painful sadness, though he makes no sound. The Slayer doesn't weep yet, but the vampire can feel the sadness, the aching, soul-deep pain harbored in her, too.
This night is about comfort. Neither of them feels the romantic love necessary for a relationship, and both are too torn up over Buffy's death to even contemplate such a step. Instead, they simply chose not to fight it when their bodies took them to each other, placed them in each other's arms.
They will probably never repeat this night. The dark-haired Slayer remembers a time when she would think nothing of such an encounter, but now is a little saddened that her first time since she chose the side of light is an experience that cannot last. Still, she was desperate tonight with pain and anger and denial and confusion and loneliness, and Angel offered a retreat from all of that.
She sees his tears, feels them too, running down her cheeks, mixing with her own. He kisses them off her face in an oddly intimate gesture, she notices, because until now, they have avoided kissing. Oh, they've cuddled, the whole point of this is to be near, close to, another person, but kissing somehow seemed a betrayal to Buffy. Kissing means love to them, and though Faith and Angel share strong friendship, it isn't love.
The vampire still cries silently, and the dark-haired Slayer licks the tears from his cheeks, half kissing and half lapping them away. She wraps her arms around his back, demanding that he move faster, push harder. The only emotion on his face is anguish, terrible pain, but he complies. Faith wonders if this is wrong, knows that it is, but she also knows that right or wrong, she couldn't have made it through this night without him.
They needed this retreat from the world, and the horrors it continually wants to heap on them.
He is two hundred and forty-three years old, almost two and a half centuries. He has seen a lot of anguish in his life and unlife. But it only plagues him more now, because he caused a great deal of it. So he suffers, fighting with guilt, fighting the urge to throw himself atop a stake every minute of every day and night.
She is the only one he has told this.
She is only nineteen, barely. Her birthday came just days before the other Slayer's death. She's seen too much pain in her life, too, but like the vampire, she caused too much of it, and the guilt lets her get no rest. She fights still for redemption, as he does, but hopes not of reaching that plateau. Instead, she wishes to level out the harm she did, with the good she can do now.
A feeling is building within her, and she arches her back, pushing her hips at the much larger figure. He kisses her cheek, far back by the ear, and she wonders if he did that for Buffy. But she doesn't comment, and he doesn't either as she runs her fingers through his hair.
He wonders if she did that for Xander.
Funny, that she's never loved a man. Sometimes she regrets not taking the chance that presented itself. She knows that she could have, might have loved Xander. She hears that he is engaged to an ex-demon, now. She tries not to care, but she can't forget. He was the first man to care about her, and not just her body.
She doesn't plan to go back to Sunnydale anyway, so it doesn't matter, she decides.
It's all in the past, now.
The vampire tenses. The Slayer wraps her agile legs higher over his back, and throws her head back. Her hair frames her face, and he presses his face into the pillow, through the silky softness of her thick tresses, muffling his voice as he calls his love's name. "Buffy!"
She doesn't mind.
She comes without a name on her lips, without a love to call to. Simply a sound utters from her lips, a sound with no definition.
Sometimes she wonders who's lonelier. The vampire who has lost his love dozens of times.
Or the girl who has never loved.
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