Stumble Into Grace- Chapter 11
-Angel-
I've been stalking her for three weeks. I half expect the police to come and haul me off of my park bench. I thought maybe we had made some progress after the crying fit she had in the shop. I showed up at the magic shop the next day and at least hoped to get a smile. I didn't. She hardly even looked at me. In the meantime I'm sitting out here freezing my ass off. Is she worth it? Yes. Does that mean I'm not pissed? No. I'm sure as hell not going to let her know I'm mad.
I'm getting desperate. I give Buffy a brief break from the stalking and go to see Willow at the magic shop on Buffy's day off. The door chimes as I walk in. Willow looks up from the counter. I can see Giles in the back room at a desk.
"Angel, Hi. Buffy's got the day off. I think she's at her apartment." Willow says.
"I know. I came in to talk to you." I say.
"Oh! Oh, okay." Willow looks dubiously at me.
I gesture toward some chairs sitting in front of a window. "Can we sit?"
"Sure," She comes around the counter and walks past me to the chairs. I follow. We sit down facing each other.
"Okay, here's the deal. I'm sure you and everyone in Cleveland except Buffy has figured out I want to spend my human life with her. I'm getting no where fast with her. I don't know what else to do, Willow."
"She's scared, Angel. When she had to kill you, it was 5 months before she could talk about it, at all. When you left her after graduation, it was almost along before she would say your name then, and you weren't even dead. I'm not talking about heart to heart conversations; I'm talking about your name. It hurt her so much to say it that she just couldn't. She's afraid she'll get hurt like that again." Willow said.
I bury my face in my hands and sigh. It is a long while before I speak again. "I can't erase the past, Willow. No matter how much I wish I could. All I can do is let her know I'm not going anywhere." I say.
"Yeah, that is all you can. It might take a little while to convince her though. Buffy is stubborn. She's only gotten more so with time. She closes herself off and won't let anyone get near. That's what she's doing with you. She's better then she used to be though. She actually cried the other day, real crying. I don't think I've seen her do that since before her Mom died."
"This is better?" I look at her in disbelief.
"She's not the girl you knew in high school anymore, Angel." Willow warns me.
"I'm beginning to see that." I say.
"So, does that mean you're giving up and going back to LA?" Willow asks.
"No." I snap.
"Good." Willow smiles at me.
I made Willow smile, well at least that's something.
*
The next day I send her an antique compass with a card that says "You can't lose me." I watched her open it from the window. She covered her mouth with her hands and I'm pretty sure her eyes teared up but by the time she looked at the window at me she'd already slid that stone mask in place.
She still refuses to talk to me on the walk home but she does have the compass with her.
This week I'm actually leaving Buffy alone during the day. I bought a car or rather Wolfram and Hart bought me a car. It's getting to cold for her to walk to work. The first day she made me drive five miles an hour the entire way to the magic shop while she walked. I spend the day looking for an apartment I actually like. I figure if she's going to make me live here in misery I might as well live in misery somewhere nice. I'm there to pick her up when she gets off work.
"Buffy, this is silly. It's cold. I'll drive you home. I won't touch, I won't speak to you. You can even sit in the back and pretend I'm a driver. I just don't you to be cold." I tell her through the open passenger side door.
She looks warily at me and then climbs in the car. "Nice car." She says.
"Thank you. Hell bought it for me." I say.
"Hell?" She quirks an eyebrow at me.
"Wolfram and Hart." I say.
"Oh, Evil Inc. That's what Will and I call it." She almost smiles but it's like she catches herself just before she does. "Is it that bad, working there?" she asks.
I'm ecstatic. This is the most she's talked to me in three weeks. "It's-yes and no. It forces me to walk in a lot of gray areas. I have to help some people that are small evil so I can get the bigger evil and I hate that but in the end, I think it works, most of the time." I say.
She nods. I guess that's the only little bit of conversation I'm going to get out of her. It's okay, it's more then I got yesterday. I stop in front of her apartment building. "Are you going patrolling tonight?" I ask.
She looks at me, hesitant to answer. "Yes, for a little while at least. Are you going to chauffer me?"
"If you'll let me." I answer.
"I'll meet you down here in an hour then." She closes the door goes into the building.
I let out a whoop of joy. I don't dance, but if I were standing up, I would dance. I have a date, with Buffy, sort of.
Back at my apartment I tear through my closet. I can't pick her up wearing what I always wear. I rack my brain trying to remember anything she particularly liked when I lived in Sunnydale. I decide on the black leather pants and a deep, almost black, wine shirt. I look in the mirror and try desperately to smash down my hair but it doesn't want to do anything beside stick straight up. I brush my teeth and have a conversation with myself in the mirror. I can almost hear Angelus' voice in my head. She might kiss you. She's not going to kiss you, dufus. She could. She won't. She might. She doesn't smile at me, she's not going to kiss me. She doesn't have to smile to kiss you. Shut up.
I glance at my watch. I've got to go, I'm going to be late and she might never forgive me if I'm late.
We don't talk much. I drive where she tells me to and pull the car up to the curb. She takes her stake out of her pocket and moves to get out of the car.
"Let me go with you." I say.
She shakes her head. "Stay here, keep the car running. I'll be right back."
"I'm human but I do have a lot of years of fighting experience. I can hold my own, Buffy." I say.
"It's not that. I want a warm car when I come back."
"Buffy, be careful." I say.
"Don't worry. The vamps here are deeply stupid." She closes the door and walks into the alley by herself.
I sit for maybe ten seconds drumming my fingers on the steering wheel then I turn the car off, get out and follow the way she went. I find a broken crate in the alley and grab a piece of wood from it. The alley is quiet. I'm still getting used to the human hearing. For days I thought I was deaf when I first became human, as well as blind. There's a door that's half open and I can hear the sounds of a fight inside.
Buffy's in a fight, that's all I need to know. I'm in the middle of it before I even know what's happening. She's fighting four vamps, what in the hell was she thinking taking on those kinds of odds herself. I duck a right hook and come up in time to slam a stake into the vamp's heart. One down, three to go; make that two because Buffy just shoved one conveniently into a broken wooden crate. God she's beautiful to watch fight. That's how I get knocked down. I catch a roundhouse in the jaw because I'm watching her. I kick up to my feet, trying to tell my human heart to slow down. I shove my fingers under the vamp's rib cage and catch the edge. I pull up as hard as I can. I hear a faint cracking and he screams. Buffy rams a stake into his heart from behind. The vamps are all dust.
"Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?" She stalks me. I step backwards. I forgot how intimidating she was when she's truly mad.
"Buffy, you took on four vamps. You could have been hurt." I say.
"Six, Angel. There were six. I dusted two before you got into the fight."
"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" I can feel the blood rushing to my head, pounding in my ears.
"No, if I wanted to do that it would have been done years ago." She snaps. "What the hell were you doing in there?"
"Helping you."
"No, you were distracting me." She says.
"Distracting? I see its okay for Xander to go on patrols with you but not me?" My voice is tense. I'm trying not to raise it.
"Don't even bring Xander into this. It's about you, not him." She says.
"Buffy, you're being unreasonable. I've been fighting for almost three hundred years. I think I can hold my own on patrols with you." I don't want to yell at her. I don't want to be having this fight with her but I have to wonder if it's better then silence between us.
"You don't get it, Angel. You're not going to so lets just drop it." She stalks toward the door.
"No, Buffy, you don't get to walk away that easy." I snap.
"Why not? You do." Her voice is cold and hard and filled with hurt that she's trying desperately to hide.
I sigh. I guess we had to talk about it sometime. I would have just preferred it be over dinner or coffee or anything besides a cold warehouse. "Buffy, I'm freezing and I know you have to be. Let's go talk about this over coffee, please?"
"You promise we'll talk. You won't do the avoidy thing?" she asks.
"I promise I won't do the-avoidy thing." I say stumbling over her word.
"Kay."
We sit tucked into a small table in the corner of a dim coffee shop. Thankfully things are quiet. I order a coffee black. Buffy orders a mocha extra foamy, extra milky, extra sweet. Neither of us speaks until we have our coffees.
I clear my throat. I guess it's my turn to start this conversation out and I honestly don't know where to start. If I say the wrong thing I could snap this very tenuous connection we seem to have made. "I'm not leaving you this time. You're going to have to get a restraining order to keep me away from and then it will only land me in jail because I won't pay attention to it."
She wraps her hands around her coffee mug and sighs. It strikes me how tired she looks. "I'm not going to tell you to leave." She says.
I start dancing inside again, might I mention this is the only place I will be doing any dancing. I can feel my heartbeat hammering a wild staccato inside my chest and boy is that a weird feeling. I take a deep breath and remind myself to calm down. It would be just like the Powers to let me have a heart attack right here and now. "So where does that leave us, me and you I mean, not us, I'm not implying there's an us." God could I be any more of a dork?
The corner of her mouth turns up in a smirk. That's almost a smile. I grin at her like a total idiot. I'm on an almost date with Buffy and she almost smiled at me. Wooohooo!
"I don't know where it leaves us. You want there to be an us? A real us not an on again off again sometimes maybe one day us." Buffy says.
Was she always this hard to follow or is it my human hearing? "I want there to be an us, a real us." I have to stop myself from telling her the full extent of the us I want there to be with the marriage and the house and the dogs and the 2.5 kids.
"Okay, so you know I suck at this dating thing, right?" She says.
I chuckle. "We'll figure it out as we go."
-Angel-
I've been stalking her for three weeks. I half expect the police to come and haul me off of my park bench. I thought maybe we had made some progress after the crying fit she had in the shop. I showed up at the magic shop the next day and at least hoped to get a smile. I didn't. She hardly even looked at me. In the meantime I'm sitting out here freezing my ass off. Is she worth it? Yes. Does that mean I'm not pissed? No. I'm sure as hell not going to let her know I'm mad.
I'm getting desperate. I give Buffy a brief break from the stalking and go to see Willow at the magic shop on Buffy's day off. The door chimes as I walk in. Willow looks up from the counter. I can see Giles in the back room at a desk.
"Angel, Hi. Buffy's got the day off. I think she's at her apartment." Willow says.
"I know. I came in to talk to you." I say.
"Oh! Oh, okay." Willow looks dubiously at me.
I gesture toward some chairs sitting in front of a window. "Can we sit?"
"Sure," She comes around the counter and walks past me to the chairs. I follow. We sit down facing each other.
"Okay, here's the deal. I'm sure you and everyone in Cleveland except Buffy has figured out I want to spend my human life with her. I'm getting no where fast with her. I don't know what else to do, Willow."
"She's scared, Angel. When she had to kill you, it was 5 months before she could talk about it, at all. When you left her after graduation, it was almost along before she would say your name then, and you weren't even dead. I'm not talking about heart to heart conversations; I'm talking about your name. It hurt her so much to say it that she just couldn't. She's afraid she'll get hurt like that again." Willow said.
I bury my face in my hands and sigh. It is a long while before I speak again. "I can't erase the past, Willow. No matter how much I wish I could. All I can do is let her know I'm not going anywhere." I say.
"Yeah, that is all you can. It might take a little while to convince her though. Buffy is stubborn. She's only gotten more so with time. She closes herself off and won't let anyone get near. That's what she's doing with you. She's better then she used to be though. She actually cried the other day, real crying. I don't think I've seen her do that since before her Mom died."
"This is better?" I look at her in disbelief.
"She's not the girl you knew in high school anymore, Angel." Willow warns me.
"I'm beginning to see that." I say.
"So, does that mean you're giving up and going back to LA?" Willow asks.
"No." I snap.
"Good." Willow smiles at me.
I made Willow smile, well at least that's something.
*
The next day I send her an antique compass with a card that says "You can't lose me." I watched her open it from the window. She covered her mouth with her hands and I'm pretty sure her eyes teared up but by the time she looked at the window at me she'd already slid that stone mask in place.
She still refuses to talk to me on the walk home but she does have the compass with her.
This week I'm actually leaving Buffy alone during the day. I bought a car or rather Wolfram and Hart bought me a car. It's getting to cold for her to walk to work. The first day she made me drive five miles an hour the entire way to the magic shop while she walked. I spend the day looking for an apartment I actually like. I figure if she's going to make me live here in misery I might as well live in misery somewhere nice. I'm there to pick her up when she gets off work.
"Buffy, this is silly. It's cold. I'll drive you home. I won't touch, I won't speak to you. You can even sit in the back and pretend I'm a driver. I just don't you to be cold." I tell her through the open passenger side door.
She looks warily at me and then climbs in the car. "Nice car." She says.
"Thank you. Hell bought it for me." I say.
"Hell?" She quirks an eyebrow at me.
"Wolfram and Hart." I say.
"Oh, Evil Inc. That's what Will and I call it." She almost smiles but it's like she catches herself just before she does. "Is it that bad, working there?" she asks.
I'm ecstatic. This is the most she's talked to me in three weeks. "It's-yes and no. It forces me to walk in a lot of gray areas. I have to help some people that are small evil so I can get the bigger evil and I hate that but in the end, I think it works, most of the time." I say.
She nods. I guess that's the only little bit of conversation I'm going to get out of her. It's okay, it's more then I got yesterday. I stop in front of her apartment building. "Are you going patrolling tonight?" I ask.
She looks at me, hesitant to answer. "Yes, for a little while at least. Are you going to chauffer me?"
"If you'll let me." I answer.
"I'll meet you down here in an hour then." She closes the door goes into the building.
I let out a whoop of joy. I don't dance, but if I were standing up, I would dance. I have a date, with Buffy, sort of.
Back at my apartment I tear through my closet. I can't pick her up wearing what I always wear. I rack my brain trying to remember anything she particularly liked when I lived in Sunnydale. I decide on the black leather pants and a deep, almost black, wine shirt. I look in the mirror and try desperately to smash down my hair but it doesn't want to do anything beside stick straight up. I brush my teeth and have a conversation with myself in the mirror. I can almost hear Angelus' voice in my head. She might kiss you. She's not going to kiss you, dufus. She could. She won't. She might. She doesn't smile at me, she's not going to kiss me. She doesn't have to smile to kiss you. Shut up.
I glance at my watch. I've got to go, I'm going to be late and she might never forgive me if I'm late.
We don't talk much. I drive where she tells me to and pull the car up to the curb. She takes her stake out of her pocket and moves to get out of the car.
"Let me go with you." I say.
She shakes her head. "Stay here, keep the car running. I'll be right back."
"I'm human but I do have a lot of years of fighting experience. I can hold my own, Buffy." I say.
"It's not that. I want a warm car when I come back."
"Buffy, be careful." I say.
"Don't worry. The vamps here are deeply stupid." She closes the door and walks into the alley by herself.
I sit for maybe ten seconds drumming my fingers on the steering wheel then I turn the car off, get out and follow the way she went. I find a broken crate in the alley and grab a piece of wood from it. The alley is quiet. I'm still getting used to the human hearing. For days I thought I was deaf when I first became human, as well as blind. There's a door that's half open and I can hear the sounds of a fight inside.
Buffy's in a fight, that's all I need to know. I'm in the middle of it before I even know what's happening. She's fighting four vamps, what in the hell was she thinking taking on those kinds of odds herself. I duck a right hook and come up in time to slam a stake into the vamp's heart. One down, three to go; make that two because Buffy just shoved one conveniently into a broken wooden crate. God she's beautiful to watch fight. That's how I get knocked down. I catch a roundhouse in the jaw because I'm watching her. I kick up to my feet, trying to tell my human heart to slow down. I shove my fingers under the vamp's rib cage and catch the edge. I pull up as hard as I can. I hear a faint cracking and he screams. Buffy rams a stake into his heart from behind. The vamps are all dust.
"Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?" She stalks me. I step backwards. I forgot how intimidating she was when she's truly mad.
"Buffy, you took on four vamps. You could have been hurt." I say.
"Six, Angel. There were six. I dusted two before you got into the fight."
"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" I can feel the blood rushing to my head, pounding in my ears.
"No, if I wanted to do that it would have been done years ago." She snaps. "What the hell were you doing in there?"
"Helping you."
"No, you were distracting me." She says.
"Distracting? I see its okay for Xander to go on patrols with you but not me?" My voice is tense. I'm trying not to raise it.
"Don't even bring Xander into this. It's about you, not him." She says.
"Buffy, you're being unreasonable. I've been fighting for almost three hundred years. I think I can hold my own on patrols with you." I don't want to yell at her. I don't want to be having this fight with her but I have to wonder if it's better then silence between us.
"You don't get it, Angel. You're not going to so lets just drop it." She stalks toward the door.
"No, Buffy, you don't get to walk away that easy." I snap.
"Why not? You do." Her voice is cold and hard and filled with hurt that she's trying desperately to hide.
I sigh. I guess we had to talk about it sometime. I would have just preferred it be over dinner or coffee or anything besides a cold warehouse. "Buffy, I'm freezing and I know you have to be. Let's go talk about this over coffee, please?"
"You promise we'll talk. You won't do the avoidy thing?" she asks.
"I promise I won't do the-avoidy thing." I say stumbling over her word.
"Kay."
We sit tucked into a small table in the corner of a dim coffee shop. Thankfully things are quiet. I order a coffee black. Buffy orders a mocha extra foamy, extra milky, extra sweet. Neither of us speaks until we have our coffees.
I clear my throat. I guess it's my turn to start this conversation out and I honestly don't know where to start. If I say the wrong thing I could snap this very tenuous connection we seem to have made. "I'm not leaving you this time. You're going to have to get a restraining order to keep me away from and then it will only land me in jail because I won't pay attention to it."
She wraps her hands around her coffee mug and sighs. It strikes me how tired she looks. "I'm not going to tell you to leave." She says.
I start dancing inside again, might I mention this is the only place I will be doing any dancing. I can feel my heartbeat hammering a wild staccato inside my chest and boy is that a weird feeling. I take a deep breath and remind myself to calm down. It would be just like the Powers to let me have a heart attack right here and now. "So where does that leave us, me and you I mean, not us, I'm not implying there's an us." God could I be any more of a dork?
The corner of her mouth turns up in a smirk. That's almost a smile. I grin at her like a total idiot. I'm on an almost date with Buffy and she almost smiled at me. Wooohooo!
"I don't know where it leaves us. You want there to be an us? A real us not an on again off again sometimes maybe one day us." Buffy says.
Was she always this hard to follow or is it my human hearing? "I want there to be an us, a real us." I have to stop myself from telling her the full extent of the us I want there to be with the marriage and the house and the dogs and the 2.5 kids.
"Okay, so you know I suck at this dating thing, right?" She says.
I chuckle. "We'll figure it out as we go."