TITLE: Happy
AUTHOR: Goddess Isa
EMAIL: goddessisa@aol.com
SUMMARY: Angel talks about Buffy's death
SPOILER: S5 Buffy & S2 Angel
RATING: TV-PG
DISTRIBUTION: help yourself - http://planetslaythis.homestead.com
DISCLAIMER: Joss owns Angel. I hate Joss.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This wrote itself, by accident, if you can believe it, because I was eating pizza and looking into the mirror.
11-28-01


She isn't dead.

She's not dead—she can't be dead.

She has to be alive, the way I remember her.

She has to be at home, in her bed, clutching Mr. Gordo while she cries herself to sleep, silently so that Dawn can't hear. Tears hitting her pillow right and left as she squeezes her eyes so tightly shut that they begin to hurt, and she's momentarily distracted from her loneliness, which is the reason for the tears in the first place.

She has to be in Sunnydale, on patrol, watching out for her friends because they need her, and even though she needs them more, she'll never admit it.

She never admits anything that she might want, or need, or desire, because she considers it a weakness, and Buffy is anything but week.

She has to be okay. The kind of okay that isn't ever really okay, but that looks okay on the surface. It's the kind that makes everyone on the outside think that everything is all right, and everyone on the inside knows the truth. Knows that inside, her heart aches, and that there's no place to hide out where the pain will stop, because the only way to make it stop is to give in, and she would rather die than do it.

Maybe she did die, rather than to have done that.

But she didn't, because she's alive. She's alive and she's happy.

Happy, like she was when we were together, and we'd go patrolling and I would take my blood into the bathroom so she wouldn't see me like that. I'd return and find her in her PJs, a tank top and flannel pants that were always too long for her short frame, so she'd roll them up. She'd be standing at the stove, breaking the crusts off all of the leftover pizza slices and smiling at me in the mirror even though she couldn't see me, because she never had to see me to know I was there. We could feel each other then, and I'd still like to think we can feel each other now.

That's how I know that this can't be true, and she can't be dead, because I can't see her like that.

I can't see her body lying in a coffin somewhere, and I can't see her in Hell, fighting the many demons that plague her.

I see her happy, walking on a cloud, munching on a funnel cake and thinking about the way she used to live her life, and how different things are now.

I see her as an Angel, but she's not in Heaven, and she's not dead.

She's not because she's Buffy, and she's here, and I can see her.

I can see her lying on the couch in my apartment, the first one in Sunnydale. We've patrolled and it's late and she's already told her mother that she's staying at Willow's, so she lies down and closes her eyes, and drifts off before she can stop herself. Her eyelids flutter as she dreams, and her hair falls across her face in such a way that is so beautiful, I can't do anything but sit there and stare at her until she wakes up.

So she has to be alive, because that's how I see her. That's the only way I can see her.

When I first moved here, I would lie in bed at night and see that first night in the Bronze. We were kissing, and the music was playing, and then everything sort of stopped, and I knew.

I knew at that very minute that it was over, and that it was just beginning, that it would never stop. That it was true love, the truest love in the world, and that nothing could ever change that.

Nothing will ever change it, because she isn't gone, and neither am I. Not yet. I'm getting close.

I feel the sun burning the tips of my fingers now, maybe even my toes. The end is near, but I can see her.

And I'm happy.