Thank you to all my wonderful reviewer's!
Chapter 2

"She's smiling." Angel noticed, as he remained by her side, waiting for her to wake.

They'd told him that it would be much better if he left, as she had already had enough for the one night, but he just couldn't bring himself to. There was no way that after believing her dead for the past two years that he could turn his back on her now.

Saying a wordless goodbye as the smoke settled between them years ago had been a mistake. Buffy never should have been left on her own, she was never meant to amount to this. A fragile soul with nothing and no one.

He had to be there for her, he had to be her someone.

"Sweet Dreams." Margaret said, smiling herself, still standing in the door way watching the blonde sleep. The nurse was glad that she could at least find solace in her dreams.

"Huh?" Angel asked

"The smiling." She pointed in Buffy's direction. "Sometimes she talks in her sleep, she dreams of a guardian angel that never leaves her."

The words hit the vampire like a blow to the chest "An angel?" He asked, watching Buffy as she took in each breath. What could it mean? If she was dreaming of an angel could it possibly be...

"Angel." Buffy sighed, rolling on her side so that she was facing the vampire.

Angel said nothing. Couldn't even if he tried. All that seemed to be going through his mind was 'If only I'd known.' Three months she'd been there, and only today had he found that out.

Gunn really wasn't that good at passing on messages. And of all things to blame it on, he used the excuse that during the end of days fight he'd lost a lot of blood, and so therefore it had done things to his head, somehow affecting his memory. But Angel believed it to be the fact that he'd drunk so much since Fred and Wesley's deaths that he just didn't care about anything anymore.

"Yeah, I think she love's him." Margaret said before leaving the vampire alone with Jane, or Buffy as they now knew her name.

Brushing a strand of golden hair away from her face Angel just looked over her for a moment. "He loves her too." he whispered, before leaning in and smoothing her brow with a kiss, then leaving her to have a chat with the nurse.


Angel stepped out into the cool night air, not that it affected him either way, hot or cold it was all the same to the vampire. Margaret was already outside, puffing away on one of her menthol cigarettes.

"So how do you know her?" Margaret asked, returning the cigarette to her lips, and holding it there a moment as she drew the deadly smoke into her lungs.

"Huh?" Angel's head snapped up to look at her, how did she know? "I don't." He quickly added, walking past her and over to his car, he had to get out of there, just being near her, and knowing that it wasn't the same Buffy, that she was buried so deep down within that body that she would never come out, was heartbreaking.

"Really?" Margaret questioned as she threw her cigarette butt on the ground and her heavy foot came down, extinguishing it. "Well then, why did you call her Buffy? And for that matter why was your name in a book the police found on her?"

"Book?" Angel inquired, closing the door to his car that he had just opened. "What kind of book?" He asked slowly approaching the nurse.

"I'm not sure, when we took it in to her to ask who the number scribbled on the inside belonged to, she snatched it away, and we haven't gotten our hands on it since. There's a photo in there as well, I never noticed it when we had it in our possession, but sometimes when she looks at it, she cries and then falls asleep. So we just know not to touch the book." Margaret said, remembering a time when one of the doctors had tried to pry it from her hands, and had ended up bruised and battered. To this day he was still on crutches.

"So you never saw the photo?" Angel needed to know.

"No, it was stuck in the back, and we never noticed it until she peeled it out." Margaret said before taking a few steps closer, she had a few questions of her own for the tall dark stranger who she only knew as Angel. "Now you tell me something... what happened to her?" Maybe this phone call hadn't been a waste of time after all; maybe this Angel would answer a lot of questions.

Angel froze, and for the first time he gave himself the chance to really think about it. Since he'd found out Buffy was alive he couldn't think of anything but that, and the fact that she was very sick. But now just like Margaret he wanted to know why, in fact he needed to know.

He recalled the soul shattering day so clearly, as though he had only lived it but a day before, and he remembered Spike's voice as he answered the phone.

Angel had just gotten out of the shower, and he wore nothing but a fluffy white towel to cover his dripping wet pale flesh.

The moment the other vampire had passed on the message the handset fell, crashing to the floor, where it broke on impact.

He had stumbled over to the couch, and slumped down, Spike's words playing over and over in his mind. "There was a fire, and... Buffy's dead." That was all the blonde vampire had managed to get out, well it was all Angel had heard before letting the phone slip from his grasp.

He'd later found out that Giles, Willow, Xander, Dawn, and Faith had all also been victims to the incineration that took place in the newly reformed watcher's council the group had set up in England.

There wasn't a thing he hadn't tried to find out. Like why, and most importantly who. He'd even gone to the ends of the earth, and when that had failed to turn up anything. He'd searched through just about every world for vengeance, but he never found it. Eventually he gave up, and tried to push the thought of her out of his mind. At first it was hard, and the idea alone of getting through a single hour without her being just a phone call away was unbearable.

There were times when he'd come so close to taking his own life, just to take away the pain, even for a minute at the very least. But with each passing day it got easier, and before Angel knew it he had suppressed her memory so deep within himself it was as though he never knew a girl named Buffy.

In the process of doing that he'd managed to alienate himself from the rest of the world. And when it came to doing his job, and saving people, well Angel did it with no compassion what so ever. If he saved them, then it was great, if not, he'd shrug it off and get on with his worthless existence.

"I need to see it." Angel said, following Margaret back into the institution, hoping that against all odds the picture that Buffy kept guarded might be able to help answer a few questions. Although he already understood what had driven her to the point of complete madness.

"I don't like your chances." The nurse returned, walking past the vampire and into the building as he held the door open.

Following close behind Angel was sure that if he were just gentle with Buffy, she'd let him see what she kept hidden from the rest of the world.


There was no way that an entire hour could have passed while he was outside talking to Margaret. Ten, twenty minute's maybe, but not an hour. He remembered that the nurse had said that the sedative would last for an hour, yet there she was, the slayer, tearing her room to pieces.

Angel watched through the Perspex square window on her door. As the hours passed he noted her every move. First her meal tray and its contents were discarded, lying there upside down, scattered on the floor. Her bed sheets torn, as the frantic slayer searched the room, over and over for an escape.

He watched as she went through the motions. First there was pure anger, which was the fuel behind her quest for revenge. A revenge she took out on the wall, her clenched fists pounding against it, over and over until she saw the blood. Then as guilt and frustration passed, the pure agony of her sorrow set in, and then finally the tears came, hot and thick, sliding down her milky cheeks.

She hadn't been out in the sun for so long now, he could just tell as her once golden skin was paler than his own. Angel couldn't believe that the girl before him really was the most powerful in the world. She seemed so fragile, as though at any moment she was going to break. Physically, she seemed almost half her size, and Buffy was slim to begin with.

But most of all he just couldn't believe that Buffy, who was once his Buffy had come to this. What had happened? Where was everyone? Why had they just abandoned her and left her to become this?

"Hot, fire, burn, dead, dead! Tried, I... I couldn- DEAD!" She screamed as the tears flowed, the moment one found its release another would follow its path, down her hollow cheeks. As she knelt on the floor, her bleeding fists pulled tightly to her chest, the pain of her past once again set in, doing its job of making her suffer for another night.

Angel tried to decipher her words, but everything she said was so random that when he tried to piece it all together, he kept drawing blanks. And yet still his mind continued to play the words over and over. Hot. Fire. Burn. Dead. Tried. I couldn't?

What did it all mean?

Suddenly it hit him. Buffy, she had died in a fire, or so he had been told. They all had. Giles, Willow, Xander, Faith, and Dawn... She'd lost everything, every single person she held dear, was gone. Now there was nothing, no one she could turn to. For the past two years, the slayer had been lost; it was only her shell that the police had found three months ago.

He couldn't believe it, everything that ever held meaning in her life was dead, and by the looks of things she blamed herself.

Angel was startled out of his thoughts when one of the doctors nudged him out of the way to get to her room. When the door opened the vampire wanted to rush inside, fall to his knees and take her in his arms. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, even if he knew it was a lie.

Instead he stopped the door that the doctor had pushed shut from actually closing with his foot and watched as the doctor tried to approach her and bandage her battered hands.

"NO!" The slayer screamed as she rose to her feet and brought her arm up and around her neck, as though she had a baseball bat within her grasp. Buffy then elbowed the doctor in the face.

Angel ran into the room then, taking it as his cue. Stepping over the doctor who was now lying unconscious on the floor, he approached the distraught slayer. "Buffy, it's me." He whispered, raising his hands in a sign of surrender as he noticed her flinch, ready to attack him as well.

She didn't respond, just stood there appearing as though she were contemplating her next move. The door was wide open; she could make a run for it. Then she could find something or someone that could help her put an end to all this suffering.

"Buffy, do you remember?" He questioned, although he was almost positive she'd forgotten. It appeared as though she didn't even remember herself, so who was he? No one but another person that had inflicted pain on her once gentle and loving heart.

Bringing her bloodied fists to her forehead, pushing her eyebrows together, she shook her head. The few strands of her blonde locks shaping her face were now stained with that blood. "No, no name, no Buff." She murmured over and over.

He felt helpless, as though the one person he would do anything for, give anything to save, and yet he couldn't. Buffy was beyond saving.

Not knowing what to say, or what to do, and with no one to turn to for help he tried the only thing he could think of, that he knew would calm her. Hoping against hope that it would do the job while she was conscious.

"I'm Angel; I think I'm the same angel you dream about... I won't hurt you. I want to help, I want to make thin-"

"Angel?" She questioned, as though the name was so familiar, yet hard to place at the same time. And yet she said it the same way she always had. That soft breathy whisper that no matter always came out a question.

He shivered, the way his name escaped her lips would always without fail have the same affect on him. The vampire took a step closer, was this recognition or was she just questioning his name? As though it were something else that was foreign in her world, a world that had forgotten her and let her become this. And after everything she had done to save it, time and time again... this was her reward.

'Powers be damned.' The vampire thought to himself.

"Do you remember?" He asked, there were but three small steps separating the pair, and Angel found himself fighting every part of his body not to clear them.

"Remember." She repeated scrunching her brows in confusion. "Never forget, never forget, never forget." She chanted over and over, before she found herself on her knees, and her tears returning once again.

Angel didn't know what to do with himself. How could she... but they had told him... there was no explanation for the two words she had uttered. He was told she would never recall the day, and yet it appeared that it couldn't have been further from the truth. She remembered, in fact she seemed to have remembered him and a day that time forgot before she did her own name.

Watching her, and the pure agony making its way through her body, Angel did the only thing he could. Taking a few steps back he bent over, grasped the bandages from beside the unconscious doctor and returned to the blonde. Kneeling beside her, he took her hands in his, ignoring her flinch, he then set out to cover the fresh wounds.

The entire night, Angel was there with her, trying to make her understand who she was. But with each attempt, she would scream at him, while pressing her bandaged fists against her ears. That was when Angel saw just how lost she was, and that she didn't want to be found.

A few hours later he tried to feed her, but she refused to eat. The nurses informed him that she would usually wait until she was starving before even considering food. He knew that it wasn't right, and he wanted to force feed her, but he couldn't alienate himself from her completely when he had only just started making some sort of progress.

Not long after that Buffy finally fell asleep. Today the blonde had been so exhausted she hadn't even managed to make it over to the bed. Gently Angel raised her in his arms, and carried her. Lying her down on the bare mattress, Angel was about to leave, until she called out to him.

"Angel." She whispered, lost in her dreams.

He paused, turning back around to face her.

"Don't go to work today, sleep in." She smiled, her eyes still closed, her body relaxing against the bed.

She was dreaming, Angel could tell, and it broke his heart just watching her. There she was, the Buffy he remembered. Smiling, loving, caring and warm, a contrast to the one he had spent the night with. And yet he loved them both just as much.

"Please?" She begged, still fast asleep as she scooted over, making room for him on the single bed. "Liam doesn't get home until this afternoon. Let's take advantage of that." She whispered, a sultry smile gracing her lips.

Angel had no idea who Liam was, obviously someone she was dreaming up, regardless, he gave in. Lying down beside her; he wrapped his arms around her tiny form.

Buffy sighed, snuggling closer against him. "Better." She whispered, as Angel's brow found its resting place in the crook of her neck.

Securing her firmly against his cold dead body, he softly whispered "I'm going to take care of you." Then sleep over came him too.