Epilogue
One Week Later
When Angel looked up, he saw someone that he didn't think he was going to see.
"Buffy. What are you doing here?" Since the confrontation in the warehouse, Angel had tried to give Buffy space. A lot had happened in the time while they had been looking after Cooper and Earle, and everyone was still raw. "How's Giles doing?" It was a lame way to start the conversation, he knew how the Watcher was but he knew that they needed to start somewhere.
Buffy smiled. It was wan, but at least it was something. "He's finally out of bed. The doctors don't think that there will be any complications, but it'll still be another week before they discharge him."
"Good." A pause. "How's Dawn doing?"
The next smile had a little more pain in it. "Well, as she puts it, being kidnapped by Cooper was worse than the time Harmony took her prisoner but better than the time Glory tried to stick her in a giant lock and twist her." Buffy actually managed a chuckle. "I think that she's going to come through this okay."
"Will you?"
Buffy chose to ignore the question. "What happened at Cooper's sentencing?"
Angel sighed. When Bob had finally left Cooper, he had revealed that he still possessed the strong personality that he'd had when he had worked for the bureau. He did not deny his role in what the tabloids were calling 'The Route 299 Killings'. He admitted that while he had not been fully coherent when committing the murders, he had carried out the actions that Bob had wanted. Several members of the staff of Angel-Slayer Inc had offered to testify in his favor, as well as several members of the Twin Peaks police department. Cooper had refused: "On some level I knew what I was doing. Perhaps I could have done nothing to stop Bob, but after Earle broke me out I made no effort. I need to pay for what I have done."
"He's going to Folsom. Life without the possibility of parole."
Buffy nodded. "Do you think he deserves it?"
Angel sighed. "At the basic level he was a murderer."
"Do you think that he deserves it?" she said again.
Angel considered it for a minute. "Not all of it, no. Whatever thing was in him -- whatever Bob was -- that's who the real killer was ."
"And we stopped it, didn't we."
Angel wasn't sure whether that was a question or not. "It's gone and it's not coming back." He tried to put all the surety that he could muster into his response
Buffy walked forward a pace or two. "Does Cooper have any idea how Earle got the information on all of us or how he even managed to get out of the black lodge in the first place?"
Angel sighed. This too had been a source of frustration. "Cooper says that Earle had told him that the all-powerful had set him free and put them on the straight and narrow path."
"Great. You're telling me that Windom Earle got some of that old time religion? Or are these just more ravings of a madman?"
"Whatever source it was, it had personal access to all our files and knew about the closed-circuit security we have in the building. It was probably an inside job."
"By someone alive or dead?" Buffy asked.
"We're looking in to it."
"Not that that'll do much good. If there's one thing these guys are good at, it's disappearing in the wind. " Buffy sighed. "It's enough to try your faith."
Angel took this in. A stranger might have thought that this was what really had Buffy upset, but he knew her far too well. "What's wrong?"
"You mean aside from the fact that Giles and my sister both nearly ended up dead because of me?"
Angel knew that that was only part of the problem and he decided to follow it up. "Buffy, I thought you got through the whole carrying-the-weight-of-the-world-on-your-shoulders. Dawn and Giles both knew the job was dangerous when they signed up for it. They aren't puppets that you could play with. They chose to show up. They chose to fight."
Buffy considered this. "That doesn't change the facts that I put their lives in peril for no reason."
"Buffy--"
"Angel, this was a police matter. Yes there was some spooky stuff, and yes we were the target. But there was no reason that, once we figured out where the two of them were, we couldn't have handed it over to the police."
"They wouldn't have been capable of dealing with Bob and you know it." When Buffy seemed about to protest, he added: "We both know that with certain things the police can only upset the situation. More people would have gotten hurt."
"More people did get hurt. Gerard ended up dead. Giles is in the hospital. I almost..." Buffy shut her mouth suddenly.
Angel knew that it was time to bring it out: "You almost killed Cooper."
Buffy hesitated. "He was going to kill Dawn."
"You almost killed Earle."
"He almost killed Giles."
"You were ready to kill him before then." Angel knew what he had to say next was sensitive, mainly because he wasn't sure why it had gotten to Buffy so deeply. "You were up in arms when you heard how girls were tortured and sexually assaulted."
Buffy swallowed . Angel mentally went over the last sentence in his head and something clicked. Not completely, because he wasn't sure when or with who, but he thought he knew why this had bothered her.
"When did it happen?"
"What?"
He knew that he was on the right track when Buffy couldn't look him in the face. "Come on, Buffy. I left L.A. for you to have a life. Sometimes in life bad things happen to people. Whether or not they have superpowers."
There was a struggle going on within Buffy between her memory and her guts. Something that she had managed to bury for a while.
"I told myself I didn't have to deal with it. The First was far more important than something that almost happened." Buffy's voice was meandering, on the verge of cracking. "He said it wouldn't happen again. And he had to have been telling the truth he had his soul back..."
And then it hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. After he had learned that Buffy and Spike had been together, Angel had told himself that he could deal with it. This, however, affected him in ways that he didn't think would have been possible.. "When did he do it?" His voice was quiet, but something primal in him had been disturbed.
"Angel, it was over a year ago..."
"When did he do it?"
Buffy sighed. "Last
April. The others had just found about our relationship. He got
drunk, he came to my house, he did something that he instantly
regretted."
"Damn it!" Instinctively Angel knew that this
wasn't helping Buffy get over her trauma but he couldn't seem to
care. "I'd stake the bastard if he wasn't already dead!"
"Well he is, so you can't." Buffy paused. Angel slammed his hand on his desk. A small smile appeared on her face. "I'm really glad I told you. I can feel the burden that I've been bearing just lifting away."
Angel managed to emerge from his black mood enough to realize that Buffy must be doing better if she was able to joke about it. "I'm sorry." Then realizing that he had to follow up on it. "How badly did he hurt you?"
Buffy took a deep breath. "He didn't really. By the time it was about to get bad, he realized what he was doing and ran off. I never got a chance to deal with it. Next time I saw him, he had his soul back. What with Willow going dark and the coming of the First, I never really got a chance to deal with it outside of my head."
By now Angel had
regained his equilibrium. "You should have talked to somebody."
"I
know... but I thought I had dealt with it. I thought that I was past
it" Buffy sighed again. "Guess I really wasn't."
"There usually aren't any easy ways with these kinds of things. Usually it comes after a lot of pain." Angel paused. "If it comes at all."
Buffy thought for a moment. "It seems that for as long as I can remember I've always had this power. I've always been stronger than most people. And as long as I concentrated on killing vampires and demons, I thought that it was good. But... after what happened to Willow, what I nearly did to her, I realized what I really was."
"To have this kind of power over people...to end a persons life. That's a power beyond anything you know." Angel looked up. "I said something like that to Faith four years ago, but I guess it holds true no matter which Slayer you tell it too."
"Big difference is she got off on it. It scares the hell out of me."
"It scared the hell out of her, too. She just had a different way of reacting to it." Angel glanced at Buffy. "Can you deal with it?"
Buffy looked at him so intensely that it almost made him uncomfortable. "I'm going to need some time. I need to think about this."
"You want to take some time off?"
"You can run the place without me." It wasn't a question.
"We can manage."
Buffy stood still for a moment, as if she was thinking of something else to say. Then she began to leave. "See ya."
She left. She hadn't said when she was coming back or even if she was coming back. And though Angel really wanted to know, he let her go.
He knew that there are some decisions you have to reach on your own. Evil comes in many forms. .
And as Dale Cooper and Angel both knew the greatest darkness can come from within.
The End
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