Authors Note: No, I am not dead. I just have been busy. The first couple weeks of no updates was because of school, and then I haven't updated this week because I've been on spring break and didn't want to do anything that required thinking. I've really had no motivation to get me all jazzed up about anything the past couple of weeks. I only wrote this chapter because I kind of feel really bad that it's been so long between updates. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy this and I'll try to be better about my updating.

Chapter Seven

Starting Over

By the time we made it back home we were soaked to the bone. Chills had been running through my system now for the past hour, but I ignored it. I continued to walk by Angel's side in complete silence, just giving him the only comfort that I could offer at the moment. My presence.

The moment we stepped inside though, the weariness hit me. I was cold, I was tired, every single bone in my body seemed to ache. The troubles of the past couple hours just came crashing down on me. It hit me so hard that I literally stumbled through the doorway.

"You alright?" It was the first words he had spoken since his quiet confession a couple hours ago.

"Yeah," I said detached. For some reason I couldn't pull my eyes away from the place where his hand lay rest on my arm. "I'm fine." He looked at me strangely, seeking the truth. "I'm just tired."

Nodding his head he started heading towards his bedroom, his hand still gently lying on my elbow as he guided me there right along with him. He closed the door as we reached the room, pealing off his jacket.

"Why don't you go take a shower, warm up a little bit." I nodded my head mutely and without much thought, walked towards the shower.

The steam from the hot water quickly filled the tiny room. Its warmth started to seep through my bones, thawing away the cold that seemed to almost be a part of me.

There were so many things that I wanted to tell him at the moment. I just wanted everything to go back to the way it was. Back to the time before the curse, before we knew it existed. I just wanted to be that young and in love once again where my biggest worry was if I'd have last year's hair or not. But we couldn't. I realized and accepted that a long time ago. I guess that doesn't matter though because the pain is still the same.

At some point during my shower Angel had came in and set some clothes on the sink for me. As I was pulling on my sweats something caught my eye. I smiled slightly as I looked down at the dark blue material. My fingers ran gently across it as I stared in utter amazement. After all these years he still had it?

Still smiling I slipped it on and walked out of the room. He was sitting on the bed, his head in his hands and suddenly I became uncomfortable in my own skin again. But the shirt meant something. Right?

He looked up at me as he heard me enter, a ghost of a smile playing across his lips. "I'd forgotten."

"Forgotten what?"

"How good you looked in that." I looked down at my feet in embarrassment. Back when we were still dating I would steal his shirts. They were always more comfortable then mine. One night, after long hours of patrolling, I went to his house not wanting to go home just yet. I remember I was upset because I didn't manage to get to a girl in time. She died right in front of my eyes as a vampire sucked her dry. When I showed up at his house in tears he had just simply took me in his arms, whispering that everything was going to be okay, that he loved me. I ended up staying the night there, wrapped up in his tight embrace. Before I had nodded off though I had slipped on one of his shirts. My favorite one. And from that moment on his dark blue button down shirt had become known as mine. Every time I was upset, or I had a crappy day, I'd show up at his house and slip on that shirt while he talked all my troubles away. The fact that he remembered that small little detail about our lives meant so much to me.

"This can't possibly be the same shirt."

"No, it is. When you died… I packed it away along with other things that reminded me of you. I couldn't bare to look at them." He shrugged his shoulders. "I just thought that you might like to have something from your past with you."

"Thank you." I whispered. And once again that uncomfortable silence over took us. That was okay though because anything was better then the yelling that for some reason had been the bulk of our conversations the last couple days.

"So you saw everything huh?" He stood up from his position on the bed and began to pace.

"Not everything. But enough." I bit my lower lip. "Angel, you really should…"

"I don't want to talk about this Buffy. We already had this conversation. That stuff is in the past and that's where I plan to keep it."

"Well you're obviously not doing a very good job at it."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Look at you Angel. You're a mess. If you've been so adamant to keeping those memories in the past, stopping them from affecting your life, then what the hell is wrong with you?"

"Nothing is wrong with me! I can't just have a bad day?"

"A bad day? Try a bad week. Hell, try a bad couple of months." I pinched the bridge of my nose. I think I probably jinxed myself by thinking that we might get through a conversation without jumping down each others throats. "Look, I don't want to fight with you."

"Then why are you?"

"God Angel just stop it! I've had shit I've had to deal with to in my life. And every damn time that I got to in over my head I talked to someone about it. It helps whether you want to believe it or not. You should know this. How many times did I show up at your house in the middle of the night huh? How many times did I spill what I was feeling to you?"

"Oh don't give me that bullshit because you shut yourself down when bad things happened to you! You went into your slayer mode and ignored everything else that went on around you until whatever was wrong had blown over. Don't sit here and patronize me about shutting down Buffy."

"Fine, you know what? Yeah, I did shut down a lot. I'll admit to that. But the rare times that I did open up, I opened up to you. You had this stupid way about you and you were always able to get me to talk. Well now it's my turn. I'm not leaving this damn room until you start sharing a little bit of your life here."

"I don't work that way Buffy. I can't just open up and share these feelings to any person that just comes my way!"

I starred at him. "Is that what I am? Just any old person that walks by?"

"You know that's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" He slammed his fist on the wall and leaned against it heavily. Deep breathing could be heard from his side of the room as he tried to calm himself down. "Angel, I know you don't love me anymore. I get that, I really do. But I'm telling you that…"

"What did you just say?"

"That I get what's going on?"

"No, the other part. The part where you said that I don't love you anymore." He looked genuinely confused.

"What's there not to understand?"

He pushed himself off the wall and looked at me hard. "You think that I don't love you anymore?"

"Well… yeah. Not the way you used to at least. I mean, why else would you be acting the way you are?" His facial expression switched from pissed off, to disbelief. I was starting to get to him.

"God Buffy, no, that's not what… You actually think that I don't love you?"

"Well can you blame me?" My temper was beginning to flare. "You've barley said two civil words to me since we got here, you've been keeping these huge secrets from me, and you go off and almost get yourself killed more times then I can even count!"

"How can you even say that with a straight face?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it's true? Look around you Angel? Do we look like couple that's in love? Do we look like happy people? Because if we do, then you sure have your priorities screwed up here. You even told me yourself. Yesterday you told me that we don't care about each other anymore, that we don't love each other and that the sooner we dropped this stupid façade the sooner we could move on. What am I supposed to think after I hear that?"

"Why don't you try for one second to image how I feel here. You've been dead for hundreds of years and suddenly you're just thrown back into my life! How the hell am I supposed to act?"

"Not even three weeks ago you were fine!"

"That was what you called fine? I think you're the one who has their priorities screwed up here."

"My point is, you weren't like this. And then suddenly out of the blue you just freak out on me. Yeah, I was thrown back into your life. But Angel, I was thrown back into a life that I shouldn't even be a part of. Me being here isn't only affecting you. And yes, with the way you've been acting lately, I have been doubting the fact that you love me and this little conversation we're having at the moment isn't making me think any differently."

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I think you should be asking yourself that question."

He threw his hands up in the air. "God Buffy. Do you think that all the time we've spent together meant nothing to me? Every damn thing I do is for you. I would kill for you, I'd die for you. Hell, I have died for you. I've came back from hell for you! I even killed my own damn sire for you. How can you say that I don't love you? For some unknown reason I still love you even after all the shit that has happened, and nothing is going to change that." He closed his eyes and shook his head sadly as he slowly sunk down onto the bed. "What every happened to us?" He said after a moment of silence. "We never used to fight like this."

"Times change. People change."

"Yeah, well I'm not exactly people." He looked up at me as he tried to figure out just what the hell we were supposed to do next.

"So we start over then. Go back to the beginning." I said hopefully. Suddenly this possibility didn't seem too complicated to me.

He gave a small smile. "You know as well as I do that we can't do that."

"Why not? Why can't we have the relationship we had when I was seventeen? The kind of relationship with no secrets, where we're there for each other. The kind of relationship where one of us can smile with out worrying about if it might offend the other person? Why can't we have that?"

"I don't know." I looked at him in shock. Usually he'd fight me on this. "There's so much between us that going back to the beginning kind of seems pointless."

"What are you trying to say?"

"I don't know Buffy! I…" He stopped and started rubbing his temples with shaky hands, and suddenly my mind was brought back to the conversation between him and Spike that I had walked in on early. Was it only a day ago? It seemed so much longer than that. Everything had seemed to go down hill from the moment Spike opened up that door.

"What's going on?" That's how it all started before. That simple little question was asked and then before I knew it we were in one of the biggest fights we've ever had, all because I had asked that damn question.

He looked at me confused for a moment. "What do you…? Are you just now joining me in this conversation?"

"Is that the same headache from yesterday?" I inquired, ignoring his statement completely.

"It's nothing."

"You're hands are shaking." I nodded my head towards his shaky fingers as he tried to hide them. "This is what I mean by starting over. We get rid of the secrets. Get rid of the tiptoeing we do around each other." He refused to meet my eyes. Slowly I moved towards him and knelt before him. "Angel," I took his hands in mine. "What's wrong?"

Closing his eyes he squeezed my hand. "I thought it was nothing at first, but it's been slowly getting worse. I'm uh… I'm hearing things and it's… It's just making my head hurt a little bit."

I scrunched up my brow knowing full well that he was lying through his teeth about the pain. "Why didn't you say anything?" He gave me a look. "Right, forget I asked that." I got up and walked over to the basin of water to my left. "How long has it been going on?"

"About a year now, off and on." Taking the wet cloth I laid it on the back of his neck, watching as the small beads of water dripped down his neck, wetting his shirt. It'll never cease to amaze me how we can one minute be fighting, screaming at each other at the top of our lungs and then the next, comforting each other.

"Who all knows?"

"Spike. Maybe Julia."

"Not Connor?" He shook his head causing me to raise my eyebrow. "You told Spike and the whor… Julia, before you told your own son?"

"He doesn't need that right now. He's already going through enough and he'd just think that this whole thing was some sort of ploy of Leon's. And I didn't tell Spike and Julia anything. Julia just suspects probably and Spike was there when… he just found out."

I got up to pace the room as I processed what was going on. "Do you think it is?"

"What?"

"Do you think that Leon has something to do with these headaches?"

"I haven't thought of it one way or another."

"An evil vampire has been trying to kill you for the past how many years and you're telling me that you haven't thought of the possibility that he many be involved? Please. You're not that dumb."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"Are these voices saying anything specific?'

"Not really. I rarely hear words. It's just kind of a whispering sound that I'm hearing. I can sometimes understand what they're saying, but not often. It's just been lately that the whispers started getting louder, and more frequent."

I nodded my head. "Okay, I'll go hit the books, see what I can find out."

"Buffy," He grabbed my hand before I could move as much as an inch. "I want to start over."

I was dumbfounded. Did he just say what I thought he said? I didn't question the sudden change of heart, mostly because I didn't want to anymore. I was just so sick of fighting with him. "No more secrets?"

"No more secrets."

I smiled slightly as I gave his hand a squeeze. I wanted to lean down and kiss him, touch my lips to his in a slow sweat kiss. But if we were truly going to start over, then I couldn't. Trust needed to me regained before we move any further. So I smiled softly at him and left the room, preparing myself for what was to come.