The fabled meeting between the warriors for good on the beach. Season 6/season 3.
Please feed me!
Disclaimer: Don't own nobody, Joss is God, etc. I know everyone and their sister has written about this meeting, and I have wanted to for a while, but wasn't sure how to do it. Just watched "Afterlife" season 6 and was struck with this grand notion. Hopefully y'all like it too.
This was a really bad idea.
I pace and pace, sand squishing between my toes. It's near midnight. Where the hell is he?
I hadn't honestly given much thought to me and him since my…return. Until a few days ago. After that oh so brillant conversation I had with Spike, and my decision to tell him what I couldn't tell the others.
Heaven.
At least that's what it felt like.
My mom was there, and Grandparents too. I had known everyone I cared about was safe, was taken care of. And then my friends decided to take the natural order of things into their own hands. Bring back the dead. Pretty cocky, if you ask me.
God! What am I doing waiting here for someone I haven't had any kind of relationship with in so long…someone I still love. Will always love.
Does he love me?
Did he call because Willow told him to? Out of obligation to our past? I know he's busy with his own stuff. Saving the souls and all that.
Atonement's a bitch. I should know.
There are so many things I'd like to take back. Like to never have said, never have done. Like throwing Riley in his face. Like not calling at all when Glory was at her worst. Who's to say how it would have turned out? Maybe we could have beat her together, and I wouldn't have had to jump…
Stop it. Stop sounding so juvenile. You did it for a good reason. The reason that lives in your house, breathes your air, loves and misses your mom the same way you do. She was worth it.
Right?
If only this was so simple. Like a matter of, well, the warrior was needed so we brought her back. And so what if she was happy, and loved, and finished. We need her, so, poof! Here she is, and she's ready to do her duty for the people, ready to sacrifice every drop of happiness she knows for the people, ready to act like she's grateful, walk around like a corpse, a zombie, a ghost in her own shell.
Will, what the hell were you thinking? And where were your senses, Xander, when she proposed this little scheme? 'Out to lunch' with Anya? Funny how so many things get conviently ignored when someone thinks they're doing "the right thing." How could they possibly know what they were doing was right? Didn't they have any inkling I could have actually not ended up in a hell dimension? Couldn't they have guessed…
Well, not from experience, anyway. The last person I sacrificed actually did end up in Hell, so I guess going with that assumption…
Headlights pass over my face, and I shield my eyes from their glare.
He's finally here.
My heart thumps so loud it feels like it's ready to jump out of my chest and back into the ground where it belongs.
He slams the door of his ridiculously large car ( doesn't that mean something?) and walks tentatively towards me. I can barely make out his features, but don't need to see him to know him. Every time I close my eyes I see his face there, shining with love and remorse back at me.
He stops about a foot away from me.
"Hey."
"Hey," I answer back, not really sure what else to say.
"Are you okay?"
I smile a bit at this, then it comes over me. I start to laugh. And can't stop. Soon I'm laughing so hard I can't stand, and collapse to my knees in the wet sand, holding my sides with my arms. He rushes to me, taking my shoulders in his hands.
"Buffy, what is it? What did I say?"
I meet his gaze, guffawing still, then die again at the expression in his eyes. My laughter drops off, and becomes something…else.
NO CRYING! Nonononononononononononononono.
His own face crumples, and he touches his forehead to my own.
"God. Iounin. I thought…God. Oh, Buffy, God!"
This last word is almost a shriek of anguish, and I slap him across the face.
"Angel, Don't. Do. That. Don't make me feel, please, if you ever had any love for me at all, don't make me feel, don't make me feel, don't make me…" I trail off and submit to gravity's inevitable pull and sink the final few inches to the sand.
He follows me, hands still like vises around my biceps.
We're both sobbing now. When was time with Angel anything but a sobfest? Back when we were innocent? Before the whole Angelus-capade? Why does he engender this strong of an emotion in me? I haven't seen him since the funeral. Well, not my funeral.
A bark of harsh laughter escapes my lips, and he looks at me, shock registering in his deep brown eyes. Still so beautiful after all this time. How could I have ever thought I could love anyone else? It's beyond me how I could have thought my heart was free to give to anyone at all but this man now facing me in the wet surf, tears streaming down his cheeks, my angry handprint still emblazoned on his face.
"Angel," I whisper it like the prayer that it is. He is my Angel. My own. And I don't know how to move on, how to tell him, how to tell him what my friends did to me.
His arms pass around my waist and he pulls me to him, his chest hitching from the heavy breathing we've been doing.
"Shhh. Nothing matters. You're here. We're here. We're together. And it's over. You're back. You're back." He mumurs this into my hair, clutching at me desperately, don't let go, don't ever let go.
"Angel, I need to tell you something," I speak into his shoulder, not sure if he hears me. He pulls away gently, still so close.
"Anything," he says.
"The spell…I don't know how much Willow told you," I start, not really sure if I can finish. Why was this so easy when it was Spike?
"Not much. Just that she was unsure til you were actually standing there that it had worked. And that you needed me," he trails off himself now. "Do you?"
I touch his face with the tips of my fingers, watching as he closes his eyes at the contact.
"I've never needed anything but you, Angel."
The corner of his mouth turns up slightly at this, that familiar smile warming my heart, so cold with the fear of what I have to tell him.
"I know that when I…when you…while you were gone," I start, "I could barely make it through one day knowing I had been the cause of your death. That it was because of me that the world would be deprived of a warrior." He tries to shush me, but I press on. "And all those months, waiting, dreaming, hoping that somehow, someway you would come back to me. When I finally realized that you were truly gone, I wasn't happy about it, but I was able to make some peace with it. Knew that I couldn't do anything about the situation, and that what I had done was the right thing to do. I sacrificed you for the good of the world.
"My turn came last summer. I did what I thought I could never do. I gave my own life for the good of the world, but more importantly, so that my friends, my family, and you could go on living in it. I knew the world would be okay if it had you guys to protect it. I was through. I was done. I had layed down my destiny, and left humanity in your care. I knew everything would be okay, and that, yes, you would miss me for a while, but eventually, you would come to a place where you could move on, too. Go on and fulfill your own mission."
His hand on my own has begun to tremble. I sigh, not sure how else to say what comes next.
"I wasn't in Hell at all, Angel. My friends have dragged me back into a world that doesn't need me anymore, a world that has moved on itself, from me. A world that is cruel, and cold, and everything in it seems hyperreal. Like I'm looking in from a frosty windowpane at the stuff I'm not supposed to have, but am forced to participate in just by my virtue of being here.
" I was happy. And I don't know how to tell them. I can't tell them. It would kill them, I think. But I can't live here like this. And I don't know what to do."
His face is turned from mine, blanched pale by the gleam of the half full moon.
He drops his hands to his sides, shaken. Not moving, not making the semblance of breathing he sometimes does just to pass as human. Still as a stone. Still as my corpse heart.
He stands swiftly, walks toward the water, head gripped by his hands. I watch his ever present leather coat flap behind him, following him like a slave to a master. Like I would follow him if I had any sense of what he was thinking.
He sticks his arm out behind him, hand reaching out to me. I rise too, and walk to take it in my own.
We stand at the waters edge, just holding hands. His cool, mine warm, a mockery of how I feel inside.
"I love you," he whispers.
I turn and face him.
" I can tell you, no, Buffy, you're wrong. You're friends only did what they did to help you. The world does need you. It's harsh and cruel without you in it. But I know you wouldn't believe me. And I know there's really nothing I can do or say to make you feel any better about it. I can tell you about Hell. About being so lost that you can't even see what's straight in front of you. About missing someone so badly that you want to lop of your own arm so the pain will be a momentary distraction. But I can't tell you about Heaven. Only you know about that. I can't share that pain, that everwhelming loss. And God knows, I know about loss. But, Buffy, the only thing I can tell you is this: you have no choice now. You can't go back. You can either choose to live in the world, accept your fate and move on, or pass through your life like a shadow and never fully walk in it."
How is he always so eloquent?
I squeeze his hand, not needing to hear anything else.
The dawn begins to creep over the edge of the ocean, tinging our faces with red. My head rests in his lap, his right hand gently entangled in my hair, his left making slow circles on my back.
I cock my head up towards his face, and before I can say anything he speaks.
"I know. I can feel it before it rises."
I sit up, reluctant to move back into the world again, the world where I don't see him every day, where I don't have his kisses to keep me warm long after he's disappeared into the night.
We stand, hands locked, fingers molded together.
We reach his car, parked next to my borrowed one. We face each other, knowing full well we may not see each other for a long time. Was it always so hard to part? Did it always feel like my soul was shred in two?
Tears begin to leak down my face, following lines that feel as if they are burned into my skin. God, I'm tired of crying.
"Buffy, I…"
"Don't." I trace his face one more time, memorizing the lines and hollows that I've seen a thousand times in my dreams every night since we met.
He pulls me to him once more, and I bury my face into his chest, the prickly wool of his sweater feeling like an old friend. I wind my arms around his back, feeling the sinewy muscles there, and up into his hair, turning my face upward to meet that gaze that my soul knows it belongs to.
"If you need me, for anything," he starts, and just as suddenly stops. The crooked smile graces his face once more. We both know I won't call him.
His head lowers to mine, and we kiss. It's like I never left.
He pulls away quickly, eyes shining with wetness, and leaps into his car, giving me one last look.
I follow his tailights with my eyes until they blur with the strain.
Do I feel any better? Did this help? Or did it just make me feel even more disconnected?
I get in my own car, and start the engine. Sit still, not ready to take the wheel just yet.
I love you.
It echoes through my mind, and I begin to smile myself.
That's enough to make it.
I pull out into the early morning beach traffic, and head back towards Sunnydale, and my reason for going on in the world. I just hope she's left me some cornflakes.