Echoes True and False

by Lesera128

D.C. Halloween 2007. In a moment of weakness, Brennan makes a mistake and finally contravenes Booth's free will, breaking the spell that has kept him from remembering his life as Angel. He regains his memories and confronts Brennan, forcing them to deal with the fallout of her actions. Bones/Angel crossover. AU. Sequel to stories like "Toe to Toe"-"The Price to Be Paid." Complete.

5. Part IIIC: Echoes of the Past, Part 3

Echoes True and False

By: Lesera128 & dharmamonkey

Rated: M

Disclaimer: Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from Bones or Angel... or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then moving on―

A/N: This part is almost twice as long as the last one, but we hope it starts to fill in some missing pieces. Enjoy!

UNF Alert: Okay, fangs and sex are involved in this one. So really...turn back now if that isn't your kink or you shouldn't be reading this stuff. We mean it. Really...

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Part IIIC: Echoes of the Past, Part 3

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Booth's heart was racing, thundering in his chest as the blood roared in his ears. He lifted his head with a heavy swallow and opened his eyes, only to see her pale, watery eyes level a piercing stare back at him as yet another image from another time and place quickly flashed in his mind.

Angel pressed the doorbell button for the third time, wincing slightly at the annoying sound as it buzzed, and he stood in front of the door waiting. He tapped his foot impatiently, his empty belly churning as he felt the bone-deep ache wrought by a century of living hell without seeing her face. He watched the peephole for any sign of discernable change and saw the light that shone through it eventually eclipsed for a few seconds, then heard the two deadbolts turn one after the other and the rattling of the door chain, before the door finally opened, and a familiar face finally greeted him.

Brennan opened the door and stared at him. She wore very short black bed shorts and a dark red spaghetti-strap tank top. Her pale eyes seemed slightly red, and she definitely looked tired and bleary-eyed. She felt her heart flutter as she saw him standing there on her doorstep. It wasn't that she hadn't expected to see him eventually—although it had been quite a long since she had—but rather that she had expected him. She'd thought a hundred times about what she wanted to say to him when he finally did show up, but after all that time, she finally found herself suddenly at a loss for words. Brennan took a deep breath and tried to gather herself, ignoring the flipping sensation in her belly as she watched him standing there, blinking back at her with an uncertain expression on his face. She glanced down at his hand as he fumbled with his pocket and saw an unfamiliar silver claddagh ring on his right ring finger. Her square jaw suddenly tensed, and she brought her eyes up to meet his with a cool, hard stare.

"Angel," she said calmly, narrowing her eyes as she drank in the sight of him, clad in a black leather duster, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and dark blue acid-washed jeans. "What are you doing here?"

He opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out, and he pressed his lips together as his jaw tightened. Angel closed his eyes, and he looked down at his booted feet, averting his gaze for a long moment before bringing his eyes back to meet Brennan's.

"I thought...you and your 'new home,' remember? That's what I think you called it. I thought you were very content there." Angel winced at her words. "So why aren't you in Sunnydale?" she asked, a hard edge to her voice as the name of the place left a bitter taste in her mouth. "Why are you here?"

"I left," he finally answered in a grim tone. He looked into her eyes—the same blue eyes that had captivated him for a century and a half—and searched in their depths for the tiniest flicker of warmth. No matter how hard he looked, instead of finding any nurturing warmth, he saw only heat, the heat burning in her eyes that he knew after all those years meant only one thing—she was angry. The look in her eyes spoke to a smoldering anger, the kind that had been burning inside of her for a very long time and which he would not be able to extinguish with the usual flash of an eyebrow or a charming, toothy grin. He felt his hopeful will wither under her icy glare as he said, "I can't...well, I just couldn't stay there anymore."

"What?" Brennan furrowed her brow, then leaned her head back and said, "But, I thought...you said...when last we spoke. You seemed content there. You..."

Her voice trailed off for a moment as she recalled the excited cadence of his speech the night she'd called him a year and a half earlier. They'd spoken for twenty minutes, and had talked about his new life in California, fighting the various forms of demonkind that bubbled forth from the Hellmouth in Sunnydale, and about her work as a graduate student finally finishing her dissertation in Chicago. The conversation had been cordial, but distant in a way that had haunted her ever since.

"What happened?" she asked, her voice sharp as she stared at him.

Angel tiled his head and then said, "Why do you think something has to have happened for me to be here?"

Sighing somewhat, Brennan shruged her shoulders slightly as she replied, "Isn't that how it always goes?"

"It's over," Angel replied tersely. "I was wrong. Since the last time I talked to you, things have changed and I've...I just needed to get out. Get a fresh start. So I've decided...I'm going to go to L.A. for a while. But before I did...I needed to, that is...I'm sorry to have come so late..." He glanced at his watch and saw that it was just past five in the morning. "I'm sorry, but...I need you, Bren. I-I...right now? I really, really need to talk to you. Can I come in?"

As he scanned her face expectantly, hoping she would invite him in. He felt a tightness in his chest as he stood there, wanting more than anything to ensconce himself in the warmth of her home and her company, to hear her voice and feel her touch again. The events of the last few months had worn him down, chipping away at his strength, and as he stood before her, he felt the faint echo of her voice inside of him begin to thrum its familiarly reassuring cadence. He rolled his shoulders back as a shiver passed through him. Angel looked at her, his eyes pleading with her to welcome him into her home, even though she'd never rescinded the invitation she'd extended to him more than seventy-five years earlier (or more for him if he counted his time in hell). Given how much time had passed with the awkward way things had been between them, he desperately wanted to find some way to make things right between them even if he also hoped—but didn't dare admit, even to himself—that she might, as she usually did, help him feel grounded and confident in his latest choice concerning how and where to proceed with his life.

Although he'd never forgotten a thing about her, he felt a warmth pulse through his limbs at the chance to drink in the sight of her intoxicating beauty as his eyes skimmed over the curve of her slender shoulder and the line of her collarbone.

"Please?" he said, his voice soft as he looked at her with the plea clear in his warm brown eyes. "Can I come in?"

She stared at him for a long time. It had been three years since she'd last seen him. There had been the occasional email, and one or two phone calls, but she hadn't actually seen him in person since they'd met in New York during a horrible January blizzard that had left her snowed in and unable to return to Chicago after the conference she'd been attending ended. He'd gotten very angry when she'd mentioned that she'd seen Darla for the first time in many, many years and the pair of them had spoken for some time at what had happened in Romania, China, and afterwards. Upset that Brennan had discussed him with his sire, Angel's already intensely broody mood had further soured. Not certain why he was so perturbed, Brennan defended her actions by telling him that he was being too emotional and illogical. They'd then proceeded to have the worst fight they'd had in a number of years and parted on less than favorable terms.

For her part, Brennan had returned to Chicago only long enough to book a flight to Central America to join a dig that one of her professors, Michael Stires, was leading in El Salvador. For his part, she later found out, Angel had gone on a bout of self-deprivation and angry brooding that reached new levels (even for him) so that by the time the demon Whistler had found him, he'd been in less than stellar conditioning.

As usual, he refused to break the gaze her eyes had established when her piercing blue irises met his soft brown ones. When she saw no anger present, only pleading, she finally relented.

"Alright," she said with a sigh, stepping back in the apartment to allow him access. "Come in," she said as he followed her inside.

Once the door was shut behind them, he lingered in the foyer, still taking in the sight of her.

When he still remained quiet, she furrowed her brow a bit and asked, "What?"

"It's just that, well, you look tired, Bren," Angel said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, it's just—I've been grading student exams all day, and I was trying to get the final grades averaged so I can turn them in by noon tomorrow." She reached up and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand as she glanced at a clock on the far wall. "Or, today, I guess." She stopped and then gestured to him, "I know it's been a while, but I don't need to tell you to make yourself comfortable, right?"

He shook his head as he peeled off his black leather coat and hung it on a peg on the coat rack near the door, then turned to watch Brennan as she walked into her kitchen and filled the tea kettle with water.

"I was going to make some tea before you got here," she explained as she popped the top back on the metal kettle. "I need some caffeine if I'm ever going to have a shot at making it through this." She let the statement hang ambiguously in the air as to what 'this' was. "So, do you want some?"

"It depends," he said, his hesitant expression finally breaking into a lazy grin. "On what kind, you know. There'll be none o' that Earl Gray crap you're always drinking. That swill is like drinking watered-down ladies' perfume and—"

"You and your tea fetishes," she said, cutting him off with a snort and a sharp roll of her eyes, punctuating her words with a pffft sound. "I always keep some Irish Breakfast Tea in the pantry," she said. He tilted his head slightly with an askance look. She shrugged her shoulders, "It's just in case, well...you know? Since I'm never really quite sure when you'll turn up, it's easier to keep some on hand...just in case."

"I know," he said with a sigh, leaning against the wall adjoining the kitchen and the dining nook.

He watched her carefully as she moved about her kitchen, unable to suppress a smile at the thought that, whatever had happened between them, she'd thought about him enough to keep a fresh box of Irish tea—his longtime favorite—in her pantry. He gave himself a hopeful nod as she dropped two Irish tea bags in a large, purple and white Northwestern University coffee mug, noting that she remembered how he took his tea (double-strong) and how much he hated taking his tea in dainty little cups.

"It's been awhile, hasn't it?"

"Yes," Brennan said, her voice more curt as she set the copper whistling kettle on the stovetop and turned on the burner. "It has. A very long while in fact."

Angel could sense the emotion in her voice. Her wistful tone tugged at something inside of him, and he felt a wave of guilt wash over him as she turned back to face him. He could tell she was hurt, but also that she was holding back on him, something he knew never to be a good thing. Hoping to begin to fix things between them, he looked at her directly in the eyes and spoke simply as he made the first step. "Bren," he began. "I'm sorry."

"What for?" she asked, working hard to maintain the calm facade of dispassion that she'd promised herself she'd maintain during any conversation they had before she'd opened the door and let him inside. Still, a bit of habitual snark crept into her voice as she narrowed her eyes at him, and added, "Aside from showing up in the middle of the night at my front door, which isn't anything new, what do you have to be sorry for?"

He gave her a pointed look as he said in a quiet voice, "You know what." He raised his dark eyebrows, forming deep creases in his forehead as he pouted his lips and gave her his best puppy-dog expression. "Come on, Bren. You know. You've always known...you've got to know. Don't tell me you don't."

"No, Angel," she said with a shake of her head, refusing to give in to him, even as she knew that he was trying to break down the walls she'd carefully constructed in his absence to keep him at bay. "I don't."

"Okay," he sighed, realizing that Brennan was going to be difficult before they could get to a point where they could really talk about what he knew they'd put off discussing for far too long as it was. He cocked his head to the side and gave her a narrow-eyed look. "Alright, then, maybe this will help. The last time we saw each other, we argued, remember? Both of us said a lot of things that I know neither one of us meant. We were angry. Very angry. And we left. You went back to Chicago, then ran off to South America to go play in the dirt with that professor of yours. And I went to—"

"California," Brennan said, sharply, snapping her eyes to look at him. "To be more specific, the affluent suburbs north of L.A., as I recall," she told him, unable to say the place's name in that moment even though they both knew that she knew it. "Correct?"

"Yeah," he nodded slowly. He hesitated for a beat before he pressed on and then added, almost as if he knew he would be throwing gasoline on an open flame, "Sunnydale."

Pursing her lips, Brennan's nostrils began to flare at the mere mention of the small town in California where Angel had spent the last few years of his life living. Shaking her head, she finally swallowed a ball of emotion that had blossomed in her throat and decided instead to latch onto sarcasm as she always had when she needed to cope with difficult and overly emotional situations. "That's rather ironic, don't you think?" she asked after a couple of tense seconds. "I mean, I always thought it was. You moved to a town named after the one thing that could kill you if you ever saw it." She paused for a minute before she spat out, "Yes, I remember now. I chose to do something productive and continue my graduate education by perfecting my skills with intelligent individuals from whom I could actually learn. You, on the other hand, chose to go to Sunnydale—the land of sun, suburbia, getting sidetracked, and stereotypical blonde damsels in distress who always need saving from something horrible, right?"

Angel could hear bitterness in her voice this time. He wasn't surprised. In fact, he'd expected it when he'd made his decision to come to Chicago to see her. Although a part of him had dreaded it, he knew they had to talk about what had happened to him in Sunnydale, because it was the only way they could move forward. It was a necessary evil. He swallowed and pursed his lips, then looked up at her and began to speak.

"Bren," he sighed. "Come on, alright? Please. Don't do that. It wasn't like that, you know. That...she...that's not why I went there." He paused, knowing, though he was unwilling to admit it aloud, that the reasons he'd originally gone to Sunnydale—he'd gone there at the urging of the demon Whistler, who'd accosted him one night on the streets of New York and had coaxed Angel into venturing to California where he was needed to fight the force of evil that were threatening to overrun the little suburb poised over the Hellmouth—were not the reasons he'd tarried there so long. He blinked away the thought. "It's over," he said, making a wisp-like sound with his lips as he made a gesture with his hand. "My life there? It's...all of that...it's done. Finished."

"Okay," she nodded at him. "So, should I say I'm sorry that it didn't work out or should I congratulate you for moving on?"

"That's not why I'm here, Bren," he said, the pitch of his voice edging upwards as his frustration mounted. "I mean, I know we need to talk about it so we can get past it, and that's part of the reason why I came here to see you. But can we possibly talk about this without getting all pissy? I didn't...that's not why I came, Bren. I didn't come here to rub your nose in what happened with her—or to have you rub my nose in it, either."

"Then, if you don't want my pity or for me to congratulate you, how about I ask what the hell were you thinking?" Brennan asked sharply. She propped her hands on her hips in a gesture of defiance and gritted her teeth as she felt her anger bubbling up in her chest. "I mean...I know we aren't exclusive by any means, so it's not that. But, really, Angel. You staked Darla because of some infantile twit with a savior complex who made you go weak in the knees?"

"What?" Angel suddenly snapped, his deep-set eyes widening with surprise beneath the mantle of his heavy brow. "How—wait, how in the hell do you even know about that?"

Ignoring his question, Brennan laughed. "I have to admit it took me quite by surprise," she said. "I mean, I know we aren't really 'exclusive'...as the modern parlance goes...and haven't been for a long time, but even back when you were Angelus, when I admit you had little if nothing in the way of standards, there were nonetheless certain...expectations between us—"

"Wait," he interrupted sharply. "Wait just a goddamn minute, Bren. We aren't like that anymore and haven't been for a long, long time. And more importantly you know that."

Again ignoring his reply, she continued. "For a vampire your age, I'd have expected more of you than to fall for the wide-eyed, flat-chested, slim-waisted teenage ingenue thing." She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated gesture of contempt, then said, "I really do wonder if you're suffering the effects of some kind of cliché midlife crisis, chasing after some underage blonde and riding in like a knight on his white horse to save her, dusting your own sire in the process. The whole thing reeks of a bad Hollywood screenplay..."

Angel rubbed his temples as he felt the tension building in his scalp. "How do you know even about that?" he asked, his voice raspy as he recalled the way his sire's body had exploded into dust on the floor of a Sunnydale nightclub. "About Darla?"

"Spike," Brennan said simply. When she saw Angel's eyes narrow skeptically and his jaw harden at hearing his grandchilde's name, she explained, "He...well, he and I have developed a type of natural affinity over the years, as you well know He told me about what happened with Darla and Drusilla and...the Slayer."

"Right," Angel grunted derisively. After a moment, he asked, "What exactly did Spike tell you?" Seeing the way her gaze narrowed at the question, he immediately decided it was not a question he wanted to hear the answer to even if Brennan was inclined to give it, and from the look she had just shot him, he didn't think she was. "Look," he sighed, "Just in case you're wondering...this isn't...I wasn't trying to keep it a secret from you. It's not another Helen thing or anything. It's just that—well, I got kinda sidetracked." He thought about the night he lost his soul, and the months afterward that he rampaged in Sunnydale, unfettered by a conscience or any sort of moral restraint. "Things haven't gone exactly as I'd planned."

Brennan's forehead crinkled for a minute before she tilted her head. "Ahh, yes," she said sardonically. "Angelus came back for a rare once-in-a-lifetime appearance that I missed although did I hear about it."

He ran his tongue along the inside of his lip as he considered the tone of her quip. "Of course, you know that our old friend Spike and his little friend Dru were part of that sidetracking business with Angelus?"

"I'm aware," she said. "He filled me in on all of pertinent details."

"Huh," Angel grunted. His cheek twitched at the thought of his despised grandchilde. "I'm surprised the two-faced little fucker didn't try to make a run at you," he said. "He's wanted to take you for a tumble since the night he first saw you back in London. It always chapped his hide that you kept company with me but wouldn't give him the time o' day. Did the little twerp bring you red roses again? Wee Willy was never very imaginative. Stupid little fuck thinks all women like roses and bad poetry. But the dumb ass wouldn't know a real woman if she held him by his scrawny little balls and offered to do all the work for him and—"

He hesitated for a moment as he remembered the night, before he was ensouled, how Brennan had strung Angelus up in her sitting room and fondled his aching balls, taking him into her mouth and sucking him nearly to the point of sweet oblivion before backing off, torturing him until he begged her for release. The memory of one of his last turns with her before the Gypsy curse suppressed Angelus for a hundred years, until one night of ecstasy unleashed him again. His lower jaw jutted forward as his anger roiled, his dark eyes smoldering as he continued his rant.

"And did the mouthy little prick also happen to tell you what happened to me while I was there in Sunnydale? Because I'm willing to bet a hundred bucks cash on the barrel that the dumb asshole probably left off the important part about losing my soul. Didn't he?" He grunted under his breath but didn't give her time to reply. "That's right. And, then, about five goddamn minutes after I got it back, I got kissed goodbye by someone who I loved and trusted at the time before she pushed me into a portal where I was sucked into hell without her even having the courtesy of telling me what the fuck she was about to do to me?"

Brennan's face tightened for a minute and then she looked away from him as she said, "I believe he conveyed those points to me, yes."

"You know, then," he said, his simmering anger moderating somewhat as he watched her turn away. He could sense the complex swirl of emotions as she stood there, her shoulders tense and her face turned away from him.

"Things in Sunnydale haven't been easy, Bren," he explained with a sadness in his voice. "They haven't been easy or simple. They've been complicated and messy and...and...look, I was an idiot, alright? I should've left long before now, but I didn't—"

Watching him as he spoke, when she noticed a familiar look in his eyes, surprise took Brennan. It was a look she had not seen in a long time, and she wondered when it had disappeared, and more importantly why she only noticed its return now. She'd gazed into those eyes countless times over the last 150 years, falling into their warm brown depths so many times as she'd sought out the source of the emotions that shimmered within them. She felt a twittering sensation in her belly and, as he looked back at her, her gut clenched.

"Why not?" she asked, interrupting him, desperately needing to understand what was going on with him. "Why didn't you?"

"Huh?" he blinked at her, stopping mid-sentence, and clearly caught off-guard by her interruption. "What?"

Brennan took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully, some of the strong emotion that had colored her voice seeping away as she struggled to understand. "If things were so bad in Sunnydale," she began. "Then why did you stay as long as you did?" she asked. "I know...the situation with Darla and...well, that happened over two years ago, Angel."

She stopped for a beat, her memory flashing back to the long night's conversation she had had with Spike over the events that had happened in Sunnydale during years Angel lived his life without her. Another wave of bitterness bubbled up in Brennan's throat as she thought about how whatever had happened to Angel when he had sex with the Slayer had caused him to forfeit his soul—leaving him soulless but for the third of her soul he held in his custody.

She remembered feeling a strangeness that night, a wave of darkness washing over her as her longtime lover stumbled into an alley, the dead heart in his chest clenching as the malevolent demon inside of him tore free from the bonds that had restrained him for a century. It wasn't until Spike told her what had happened, and why, that the resentment inside of her flared into anger. The Slayer was not the only other woman he'd slept with since his ensoulment, she knew—so what was it about sleeping with the Slayer that had been so damn special that he'd lost his soul after just a single night between her legs? She didn't know, but the thought of it sickened her.

"And...Angelus?" she finally managed to say when she realized her voice had trailed off as she became lost in her thoughts, and Angel was staring at her expectantly as he wait for her to finish. "That whole thing with him...well, that was almost a year and a half ago," she finally said. Tilting her head, she then added, "If we were having this discussion after that potentially impressive would-be young woman Willow re-ensouled you after Jenny Calendar was murdered—"

"Don't," Angel growled, his eyes darkening as he remembered the utter contempt his demonic self had felt for the Gypsy woman and how he'd refused to feed on her. He could hear the sound of Jenny's neck snapping and feel the way her slain body had dangled in his arms as he carried her into Rupert Giles' apartment, setting up roses, champagne and romantic music so that the Watcher would arrive home to find her pale, blue-lipped body arrayed in his bed. "Just...don't..." The memory of his own cruelty—or, rather, the cruelty of which he was capable when the demon inside of him was unshackled from his soul—made his fists clench in guilty anguish, his stomach turning as regret flooded over him. The knowledge of what he was capable of frightened him, especially when he heard the dark murmur Angelus' lewd voice grow louder in the presence of the one person he cared for most, and the one person that Angelus had most wanted to taste but had never been able to savor in that way.

Brennan's eyes narrowed briefly. "I don't understand," she continued. "Why did it take so long for you to...well...you know." She gave him a pointed look as she watched how his mood had shifted dramatically darker at her mention of the period when Angelus tormented the Slayer and her friends in Sunnydale. She shot him a hard glare. "Don't be obtuse, Angel."

"What?" His brow furrowed hard over his eyes. "You mean why did it take me a bit of time to get back on an even kilter even after Buffy found me once I came back from hell?"

Brennan nodded slowly by way of her only response to his question as she found her voice had disappeared when Angel had spoken of the Slayer by name for the first time since his arrival. It hurt her more than she thought it would, even though she'd been prepared for it to hurt very, very badly. Thus, she was quite happy when Angel seemed too engrossed with his own thoughts and feelings to notice her discomfort.

Angel sighed. "Please, Bren." He fussed with the Zippo lighter in his pocket, nibbling the inside of his lip anxiously as he struggled to figure out how to explain what had happened to him. He'd given up smoking, for the most part anyway, decades earlier, but he still carried a lighter in his pocket by sheer force of habit. "I don't—"

"Tell me," she pressed him relentlessly. "I want to know...more importantly, I deserve to know. So, tell me why."

He leaned his head back and swallowed, knowing full well from the look in her eyes that she wasn't going to let the issue drop no matter how much he would rather not speak of it. "I-I...I wasn't in a good place when I came back, Bren. Something happened there, so that I wasn't..."

He hesitated, his pupils pulsing as he blinked, grasping for words.

"I was...it's just that...well, having my soul...and, I can't lie...even having a piece of you with me when I went, it was...I'm not sure how to explain it, Bren. But...it was like diving into a shark tank with your pockets full of bait fish."

Angel felt a shudder pass through him as the memories—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations of the horrid place he'd been—inundated him again. He pressed his lips together in a firm line as he tried to gather himself.

"It was a horrible place, Bren," he continued. "The air, it was full of fearful and anguished voices. The air vibrated with them, really—all these voices in pain, and they'd howl all the time, like a horrible wind that never died down. And the smell? That smell? The smell of fear...it was was everywhere. It permeated everything. Nothing was still. Nothing was even, and nothing was constant, except the fear and the pain and the terrible suffering that colored everything. I don't know how to explain it, Bren...except to say, well...it wasn't a good time. Not at all, not in the slightest. They don't call it hell for nothing."

"Okay," she asked, pressing him as her voice hardened. She knew her normally chatty lover was holding back, but she didn't know why, and it frustrated her. "So, aside from the obvious—because I know going to hell isn't like going on a picnic in the countryside or going to a garden party. But, it would seem as if you're implicating there was more to it than the obvious. So, tell me. I know there's something that I'm missing. So...just say it. What haven't you told me yet? What is it?"

Angel looked away and swallowed, sighing and staring at the wall for several long moments before he turned back to face her. "Well, for starters, how about this? Even though I was only gone a few months, I mean...at least to everyone else here on earth...but when I was there? The torture? It went on for over a century, Bren. A century. And during all that time...there was only one constant besides the pain."

"What?" she breathed. Something about the way he spoke, whether the deliberate cadence of his speech or the raggedness on the edge of his deep voice, gave each word a gravity that scared her as she waited to hear him say what she already knew to be true in her heart.

"He tried to get me to give you up, you know," Angel said soberly. He looked down at his feet, then brought his eyes back up again. "He...He thought He'd finally found a way to beat you. He was giddy at the idea of it. He wanted me to betray you, Bren. To help Him destroy you. That's why He came to me the first time, and why He kept coming back to me again and again and again. He swore He'd wait until the end of time if He had to because He wouldn't give up. He said He'd wait however long it took, and He'd keep me there, forever if He had to, until I gave in. He said He had time, you know, and didn't have any other important business except this...except for you. He'd waited for a long time already, so He said waiting a bit more wasn't a big deal. He wanted you, and He said He'd have you. By any means necessary."

Although it had been 250 years since he'd last drawn a human breath, Angel felt a distinct tightness in his chest with each word he spoke, as if the words themselves—and the admission they contained—were slowly choking him. For nearly eighty years he'd held a third of her soul inside of him, having sworn to protect it with everything he had and everything he was. His mouth went dry and a hard lump formed in his throat as he confessed how close he'd come to failing her...to breaking his promise to her. He swallowed the hardness in his throat, his nostrils burning with emotion as he summoned up the strength to continue his tale.

"And that's why He kept coming back to me," he whispered. "Again and again. For a hundred years, Bren."

"Who came to you?" she asked, though the gravity in her voice belied her confusion. "Who was it, Angel?"

He looked at her for a long moment. Angel had long known the day would come when he would have to tell her about his time in hell, and what had happened to him there, and as he gazed into her deep blue eyes he remembered how he had tried so hard to keep the thought of her eyes at the forefront of his mind through it all. He had imagined that, when the time came to confess to her what had happened, she would have heard his confession with her usual matter-of-factness. But when he looked into her eyes, her objectivity had all but fallen away and he saw something else emerge from behind the veil of her gaze, something he could not in that moment put his finger on. Sympathy? Guilt? He wasn't quite sure.

"You know," he said, his eyes flashing as he looked at her. "You already know."

For the first time since he'd arrived, Brennan truly softened a bit as she asked in a gentle voice that gave away the fear she felt, "Do I?"

"Yes," he sighed, the sinews of his chest tightening even further as he heard the fear in her voice. He knew he had to tell her, to lay his cards on the table and come clean about what he'd suffered to protect what she'd given him. A wave of nausea crested in his gut as she stared back at him expectantly. "You do," he said, a part of him hoping he would not have to identify his tormenter by name. "I know you do. Don't you?"

She was quiet for a minute and then she said, her voice an anguished croak, "I wish I didn't but...yes, I think I do., even if I don't think I can verbalize it right now."

"Fine," he nodded at her. "If you can't say it, then I will. It was The One," he replied. "The One you made your bargain with so many centuries ago. Your very first one, I'm sure you remember. He came to me, you see, because He'd sensed you...or, what I have of you, from almost the very moment that I arrived there. He was so fucking happy, if you can imagine it. It was like He'd thrown a huge party, and I was the surprise guest—the one who showed up unexpectedly and turned his little beer and chips get-together into a full-on, raging New Year's Eve bender to remember for a lifetime—and He dropped everything to focus on me. He wanted..."

Angel frowned and shook his head as a reel of painful memories flashed in his mind. He remembered walking through a particularly nasty corner of one of the planes of hell, over a rocky, ruggedly-cobbled terrain, seemingly endless bands of mountain ranges that rose four thousand feet from a sizzling desert floor, the land dotted with bubbling lakes of lava that throbbed and bubbled as he passed by. He scaled these mountains in his bare feet, the soles torn and bruised by the hot, sharp rocks he walked over. His skin, cool to the touch in the real world, burned and blistered from the heat of the swollen red sun that filled the sky overhead. A sulfuric stench of decay refused to leave his nostrils no matter how many times he tried to clear the scent away from his mind. A nearly-constant breeze blew there, a hot, miserable wind that howled with the blood-curdling anguish of the damned. And even when the sound of the wind died down, his ears still hummed with the murmur of His voice, calling out to tempt him.

"He wanted it," Angel explained. "The third of your soul, the third I have. He tried so hard at the beginning. At first, He tried to tempt me. He was so amiable and almost jovial at the beginning, you know. That wasn't when it hurt. The hurt...well, that didn't really start until later. But first? He made me all these offers, you know. He was willing to give me anything I wanted...everything, really. There wasn't anything that He didn't try to use to get me to get what He wanted. He tried it all. He told me there wasn't any limit on what He could do. He said He could unwind time so that I'd never met Darla, never been turned, never killed my family. He said He could make me forget everything I'd ever done as Angelus and the guilt that...you know, all of that...it would disappear and I'd never feel it again."

He thought about the night he'd met Darla, how she stood in the alley, her lips just inches from his, and how she'd promised to take him places and show him things he never'd seen before. The pain of losing his life in that alley was fleeting, scarcely a memory at all, but the consequences that flowed from her vampire's kiss filled his mind with torment. The taste of his parents' blood, sticky and bitter, and that of his baby sister, Katie—whose blood, like the girl herself, was so sweet and full of her innocence—had coated his tongue the night he came to slaughter them and had never left his consciousness. The One promised to make it all go away, to rid him of the anguish and the memory of the tens of thousands of human lives he'd taken in the hundred and fifty years he'd rampaged through the towns and cities of a terrified Europe. All of his pain, The One promised, could be gone in an instant, itself a rapidly-fading memory, if only he'd give in and give Him what He asked for:

Her...

Angel closed his eyes and sighed, deeply ashamed that he'd been weak enough to have felt tempted by the offer.

He fell silent for a moment and sighed, staring at his hand as it rested on the countertop, and with his eyes followed the web of veins that covered his hand, blinking at the brightly-polished knotwork on the silver ring he wore on his left middle finger before once again bringing his gaze up to meet hers.

"He even...He even offered to make me human again, and send me back. He said I'd never want for anything. I'd finally have a normal life—a wife, children, a home, a job...happiness and love. All of it. He offered me money and power and anything He could think of, but He started to get frustrated when I wouldn't bite. So after awhile, He started to curse me. He started to...He did things. All kinds of things. He filled my mind with ideas that you had lied to me. That you never cared for me. That you used me. That—that you were the one who had sent me to hell, who had...who had betrayed me. He told me these things, and as I was in His house...surrounded by the sights and sounds of His dimension, I couldn't get His voice out of my head. And, you know...it ate away at me."

Angel paused for a minute, his eyes opening wide as he studied her. His voice softened, cracking a bit as he spoke. "But...I managed to get through it all because...somehow, I heard you. I heard your voice as it called out from somewhere deep inside of me, telling me that what He was saying to me, the whispers of doubt that gnawed at me from inside my own head, that all of it was a lie. And, so, I didn't give you up, Bren. I kept my promise...just like I said I would. I didn't sell you out. But..."

He leaned his head back and swallowed, his Adam's apple dipping as he gulped quietly. Angel remembered how a friend had told him once, 'No good deed goes unpunished.' And in his case, the one truly good thing he'd ever done was to protect her soul, and he'd been punished for it. For ten thousand days, he'd been strapped to the breaking wheel and forced to endure having the long bones of his legs and arms shattered by bludgeons, over and over again, until the pain itself became part of the furniture of his mind. Then another ten thousand days passed on the breaking wheel, but instead of being set upon by iron cudgels, he'd been flayed, the skin torn from his body in sheets, leaving him so raw and exposed that the whispers of his torturers made every nerve ending scream in agony. The pain was so intense that he was constantly teetering on the edge of consciousness, always yanked back from the brink after each fainting spell by being doused with a bucket of salt water.

And as his body howled, his mind burned, too.

'She wants you to hurt this way,' he was told. 'She's a witch. She gets off on the pain of others. You know that. You've seen it yourself. She loves torturing people. And, even if she didn't want to cause you pain, if you really meant anything to her, don't you think she'd help you? We both know if she wanted to help you, she would, yet here you are.' Over and over again, like a metronome, the seeds of doubt and betrayal were planted in his anguished mind. 'She cares nothing for you,' the voice told him. 'She never has. She never will. It was all an act. She's abandoned you. She left you. You owe her nothing, boy. Save yourself. Leave her to Me. Let her be Mine.' Year after year, decade after decade, for a century, Angel resisted the temptation to give in, holding firm to the one thing he had left:

Her...

"But even as I fought back against the lies," he said, "it still...all those lies and the things I saw and heard. There was still a price, Bren. There was still...when I came back, I wasn't the same. I-I...what I heard and saw and felt, even though I knew it wasn't true, it still hurt. It had been so long, so many years. He hadn't been lying when he said he had all the time in the world to wait. A hundred years or more went by. And when I finally got free, I was back in Sunnydale...alive. To a point. But, the thing is..."

His voice trailed off again, causing Brennan to prompt him.

"What?" she asked, her voice a painful plea. "Please...tell me. What else happened?"

Angel looked at her, his mouth hanging open as he felt his skin tingling and his gut twisting in his belly. His chocolate brown eyes glimmered with moisture as the memory of his agony seared him, and his nostrils flared as he swore he could smell the sulphur of the roiling lava pools. He closed his eyes as he tried to ignore the sense-memory, then opened them again and gave her a pleading look as he silently begged her for understanding.

"I went—" he tried, shook his head as his voice got caught in his voice, and he coughed to clear the ball of swollen emotion that had choked his throat closed before he continued. "I think I went mad," he finally managed to tell her. "There was nothing I could do but concentrate on just staying alive. I forgot who I was and what my purpose was. I forgot it all. I was cracked. Wild and feral. I felt like the man I was..." He shook his head. "I felt like I'd been smashed into a hundred thousand pieces, you know. When I came back, there were scars, Bren. There were scars...and I wasn't the same person I was before I left."

Brennan narrowed her eyes as she weighed what she'd just been told. The pain she saw in his eyes reminded her of the look he had on his face the moment their eyes first met in the alleyway off Halsted Street in 1923. The drawn expression he wore seemed almost worse, in a way, and she suddenly felt a dark nausea swirl deep in her belly at the knowledge that he'd endured so much suffering for her benefit. The true cost of the bargain they'd made eighty years before had finally come to be paid. After a minute, she asked. "And so you're saying that's why—?"

Angel nodded, his throat tight as if his body itself didn't want to speak of the horrors anymore. "Yes," he told her simply, the single word coming out in a rasp as he found his voice again. "When I got out of there, you know, out of hell, away from all those voices—especially His voice, which wormed its way into my head, Bren, so deep it got to the point I had trouble figuring out which thoughts were mine and which were His—it took me a long time to get my head screwed on right again. And, maybe it seems strange, but I felt like I was banged up, bruised and battered like I'd been in a real knock-down, drag-out fight, except it wasn't my body that hurt, but my mind. And, it took awhile for me, for my mind to heal, I guess, and to get His voice out of my head, and...I wasn't sure what you'd...how to help you understand what had happened and why. I didn't want to burden you with it. And besides it was, well, Buffy found me."

He stopped for a beat when he saw Brennan flinch again at his mention of the Slayer's name. "I'm sorry," he said, acknowledging the way the mere mention of his Buffy's name caused such an intense reaction in the woman he'd loved for a century. "But...it's just..."

He shook his head and looked away for a moment, gathering his thoughts before he turned back to her and continued.

"I couldn't...I didn't have a choice," he tried to explain to her. "Bren, you've gotta understand what she did for me. She took care of me, and all I could concentrate on from one day to the next was getting better. So for a while, that's all there was in my life."

He fell silent, and recalled the morning he woke up and noticed it—the murmur in the back of his mind and the steady thrumming in his chest. At first, he thought the murmuring voice was that of The One, finally catching up with him again, but then he let his thoughts reach out and listen to the voice. Its timbre, while a little throaty, was clearly that of a female, and as he listened to it, the memories came tumbling back, and he remembered a thousand conversations with the husky-voiced woman who owned that voice. He remembered waking up in a woman's bed, his legs tangled with hers as his fingers caressed a head of dark, auburn hair as that voice spoke to him. Slowly, he remembered her. And once he began to remember her, he began to remember himself.

"As time went by," he continued, "The memories came back. I started to remember who I was...and who you were. Eventually, I started to realize that I felt bad that...that this happened, and that I'd been tempted, even though I resisted, and..."

Angel blinked a couple of times, his jaw turning rigid as he thought of how the resentment he had once felt at Brennan for being the cause of his suffering paled in comparison to the anger he felt at the Slayer. "And all of it, you know, was because of her...because she sent me there, only to have Him try and use me to get at you."

Brennan considered his words, and as she did so, she felt a wave of guilt and pain wash over her. for what seemed like the hundredth time that morning. Still, even as she struggled with her emotion, an image flashed in her mind as she processed the full meaning of what he'd just said...and who he'd just mentioned. His rather seemingly innocent words conjured a vague image that she'd seen a few times in her mind over the last three years. However, just as in the past on each occasion when she'd done so, she'd felt a swirl of negative emotions as the irksomely young visage of a woman with dirty blonde hair and green eyes echoed in her mind.

Struggling to stall for enough time to make certain she had a grip on her emotions, she moved to the cupboard to retrieve a dark blue stoneware mug for herself and, dropping a bag of Darjeeling tea into it, set it next to the Northwestern mug he'd picked out for himself. She put both mugs on the side counter next to the stove as she shook her head and said, "Alright."

Again, Angel's brow crinkled in confusion at the lone word she'd just spoken. "What?"

She looked at him, some of the pained look in his face having relaxed away as he looked back at her somewhat blankly. "Listen, Angel," she began. "I-I...I'm sorry if you were hurt and suffered because of me. I really am, but—" She stopped, biting her lower lip before she sighed. "But, you know...I can't help but think that...while you suffered because of me, you never would've had to endure that if it hadn't been for...well, I didn't send you to hell. I wasn't the one who betrayed you."

Angel stared at her and blinked, his brow knit hard over his dark eyes. But he didn't interrupt her as she struggled to explain.

"And, now...hearing what you've just told me..." Her voice stopped for a minute before she continued. She stared at the granite countertop and shook her head as she ruminated on the idea that, in the wake of his agonizing experience in hell, he'd sought comfort and healing not from her—despite all the other times she'd tended to him when he needed comfort over the last eighty years—but rather from a naïve, bright-eyed seventeen year-old who knew little of the complexity of the world, or of the man Angel was. "It's times like these that I really wonder, Angel. I-I..."

"Wonder about what?" he asked, scratching the back of his head as he watched her close the cabinet roughly. "You know I've never done subtle, Bren. What do you mean?"

She nodded lightly to him as she said, "Okay, well. It's just that..." Her voice trailed off before she let out a puff of air and then tried again. "You...me...us...what's happened to us." She shook her head. "I remember a time not all that long ago that I had a pretty damn good idea what you were thinking before you even smiled or frowned or even just looked at me, let alone said the words. But, now...now it's all different. We're different. And, I can't help but wonder if maybe this is my karma."

"Bren," he sighed. Angel was sure he'd done the right thing, protecting her soul despite the indescribable suffering he'd endured to do so, but as he listened to her words, it seemed that he'd done something irredeemably and irreversibly wrong. His eyes narrowed and he shot her another puzzled look. "Karma? What are you talking about?"

"I've just been thinking," Brennan said, her voice taking on a pained tinge that was very different from the myriad of emotions that she had already voiced during their intense conversation.

"I just can't help but thinking if maybe this is balance coming back into my life, finally," she said. "I-I...I...you and I. Us. It started out for one reason, and I can't deny it's changed so much from what things once were when we were in London so many years ago. But, the last few years, I'd be lying if I said I can't help...well, you know things have changed between us. I'm not quite sure how or why it happened, but I think it's pretty clear that things aren't the same for us. And, that's had me thinking that maybe...maybe this is how Darla felt when you started to spend time with me."

"What?! No!" Angel growled, his jaw tightening at the mention of his sire. "What the hell are you talking about? You've got to be kidding me." He paused for a beat and then shook his head as he continued, "You've got it all wrong, Bren, if you think Darla cared at all back then. She had other men in her bed half the damn time. It wasn't..." He grunted. "It was totally different."

Brennan held his intense gaze for a long moment and then she shook her head. "That doesn't matter, and you know it," she told him. "The important part is that you started to change and that change was because of me. It was a gradual, slow type of process. You still saw her, and when you were with her, things were mostly the same...or, at least close enough that she could pretend to convince herself that things were just as they'd always been. But, eventually, you crossed a point of no return with her. And, the fallout from crossing that line culminated in you staking your sire. You loved her once—"

"I never loved Darla," he interrupted her. His brow furrowed before he quickly amended, "Or...at least, not really...the way I was, back then, I wasn't able to love anything or anybody but myself. I guess maybe I loved Darla as much as I could've loved anything back then, but that's not really love. It was more like a...wanting." He stopped and then shook his head again, "You know, Bren, it's not the same. You and me? What I feel when I'm with you? When we're together? Those feelings I felt when I was with Darla...it's not like what I know now...because of you."

Brennan felt the pain she'd felt gathering in the pit of her stomach since his arrival on her doorstep flash once again, this time threatening to travel from her stomach to her throat where it would lodge itself in a swollen lump if she wasn't careful. Determined not to be weak, she pushed the impulse aside, and concentrated on her earlier train of thought.

"We both know that you loved her as much as you were able to back then," Brennan told him. "You can play semantics on what kind of love it was, but it was as close to loving anyone but yourself as you ever did back then, Angel."

"Bren—"

Shaking her head, Brennan refused to let Angel get a word in edgewise. "Listen to me," she told him. "All of that...well, all that stuff? It's not even the important part. The important part is that when you didn't feel the same way about her as you once did, you killed her. You found someone new."

"Bren, that's bullshit," he said, a renewed forcefulness in his voice. "That's bullshit, and more importantly you know it. I killed her because she was killing innocent people..."

Brennan rolled her eyes. "Since when is that new?" she snorted with a sharp, biting snarky chuckle. "She was doing as she always had..."

"That's not the point," Angel countered. "I went to Sunnydale to keep the hell-beings on their side of the Hellmouth. Darla emerged from the Hellmouth to do the Master's dirty work. She was always at the other end of the strings he pulled, you know, since long before I was ever born. He'd call, crock his rancid fucking little finger, and she'd always come running as quick as I'd ever seen her do anything. So when he took up residence in the caverns underneath Sunnydale like some sort of Hellmouth traffic cop, there she was, trotting along behind him. I had to end her, Bren, and it's got nothing do with you—"

Ignoring his comment and cutting him off, Brennan continued. "We both know, back then, I was new and, in some ways, a whole hell of a lot less complicated than Darla. So, if it happened once, it's not really surprising that it's happened again. You found someone new...someone who's younger and without all the baggage that I've got and lets you play the hero. And, now...a part of me can't help but think that maybe...maybe that since you don't feel the same way about me as you once did that eventually will I need to worry about you coming at me with a stake or however else you might try to get rid of me? Will you try to kill me like you did her?" She shook her head again, "I mean...I doubt you'd be able to pull it off because I'm a lot more powerful than she ever was. But...you could still try."

He gritted his teeth and shook his head. "This is crazy, Bren," he said, his voice edged a half-octave higher as his frustration quickly mounted. "You're not Darla. What you and I have, what we've done and been and shared...it's a million light years away from what it was between me and Darla. You're...I can't even believe you'd compare yourself to her. Darla never did me any favors, not once, unless she saw something in it for her. And you know what? Before I...before she died, the only thing she wanted was Angelus. She didn't want me. She wanted the vicious animal that I'd been at her side. She left me high and dry, more than once, Bren."

Angel rolled his shoulder and grunted, shaking out his arms and flexing his hands as he tried to release the tension that the very thought of Darla wrought in him. He looked at Brennan, letting his eyes skim along the outline of her square-jawed face, along the side of her slender neck and down to her shoulder. His gaze paused at the notch at the base of her neck, then he looked up and into her shimmering blue eyes.

"Bren," he said. "You...you've never done that. And I've never...I mean, what? Have I ever done anything with the intent to hurt you? In all the years—in all the years, Bren—have I ever done a single thing to hurt you? Because you know what the answer is? I haven't. Never. Not once. And I can't believe you'd...that you can't trust me not to hurt you. After everything we've been through, if I'd wanted to hurt you, Bren, I could've done it a hundred plus different ways before now. Do you even know what was going through my mind when I was Angelus? Or...after? I could've let The One have you, instead of letting Him drag a red hot burning metal rake through my brain every day, turning me inside out that way. I mean, fuck, Bren."

Brennan watched, opened her mouth slightly as if she was going to say something, and then promptly closed it.

He stared at her for a long time and then said, "Going to hell was one thing. Like I said, it wasn't a fun time. But...as painful and as grueling an experience it was to get through, I knew I could do it. You know, that I could get through it somehow. I wasn't ever really tempted by anything that He'd offered me. I can't say the same when I lost my soul. That was...that was...well, you want to know why I had to stay away from you? Because, it was like, suddenly...the man I was was gone all over again, and for four months, it was a blast from the past that wasn't fun in any way, shape, or form. Thing is, even though I'd lost my soul, which unleashed Angelus, I still had yours, and enough of—enough presence of mind, I guess—to know what I was doing and that it was different than what that other me might have done. I was him, but there was still enough of me—or, rather, you—that a part of me was still suffering all that time, even as I was ripping it up and having a grand old time raising hell as Angelus."

Angel paused, gazing into her pale eyes as he rolled his jaw from side to side, putting the thoughts together in his mind. He felt a flash of something dark and wanting low in his belly, and he remembered what it felt like to walk the streets of Sunnydale each night unencumbered by conscience, decency, or self-restraint. He recalled the want radiating through him, murmuring in his ears. Every face he saw was an opportunity to satisfy a hunger of one kind or another. Every bared neck he saw was a would-be meal. Every woman he saw was a potential release. But none of them—none of them—stirred in him the throbbing want he'd felt for her.

"You know what?" he said, his voice taking on a hard edge. "The whole time, when I was him, I kept wanting to come and find you. I could feel you, you know—that third of your soul, pulsing inside of me, the only soul I had at that point—and I could feel myself drawn to you, Bren, like a moth to a flame. All I wanted to do was feed, fuck, and kill...preferably, using you for the first two and doing the last one with you. He thought...or, I did, when I was him, that you'd gone soft over the years. He knew what you were...what you were once capable of, and he wanted to tease it out of you again. So Angelus...me, I wanted to come to you...for you."

He hesitated for a moment. He remembered venturing one night to the rundown area on the wrong side of the tracks, near the freeway where he knew there was a string of dingy, dive bars. He went into the bar, his belly growling with hunger, and he saw a woman standing next to the jukebox. She had a long, slender neck, shapely shoulders and a nice, round swell to her hips, but it was when she turned around, and he saw her auburn locks and slate-blue eyes that he knew he had to have her. So he did. He had her—taking the woman, a truckstop prostitute, against a wall in the alley behind the bar before feeding on her and leaving her limp, broken body behind a rusty dumpster—but walked away disgusted that the taste of her blood and the feel of her pussy wasn't anything like the woman he truly craved.

Angel blinked away the memory and began to speak again. "He knew it, you know? That he had a part of you, and that he shared me, my body, with that part of you, that part of your soul. He held the reins, controlling my physical body, but couldn't quite control you, that part of you that was inside of me. He wanted to control it, and it pissed him off so fucking badly that he couldn't. He knew that, until he came for you, and brought you back around to his way of seeing things, to the dark side at it were, he wouldn't be able to control that part of me. The you part of me, you know..."

Angel shook his head wryly before he continued. "He wanted you," he said. "He wanted you so bad, but he couldn't have you because you were here, out of reach. He was livid. So he went after soft targets. Easy marks. Convenient prey, as it were. Buffy and her friends were an amusement, but no real challenge. He played with them like a cat does its favorite ball of string...just like you used to play with him. He played with them, but it was always you—and the challenge of you—that he really wanted...and never got."

He stopped for a moment and then shook his head as he recalled how close Angelus had come to leaving Sunnydale had it not been for the actions of Buffy and her friends. He started to voice his inner monologue before he even realized what he was saying.

"You may not realize it," he continued. "But you're lucky that I didn't come to you then. I know, I know. You're gonna say how you could've handled Angelus, but the fact is, you owe Buffy a big thank you. She kept Angelus occupied, so he could stay the hell away from you so that you wouldn't have to see if you could handle him or not."

Brennan's eyes widened a bit as she felt the pain she'd experienced earlier turn into a slowly-bubbling indignant rage. She bit the inside of her lip, determined not to let him goad her into unleashing her emotions. Letting out a slow breath, she said in a very measured voice, "I'll be sure to send her a thank you card the next time I think of it, then."

"You don't get it," Angel barked, the muscles of his jaw suddenly tensing as he stared at her. He held her smoldering gaze and met it with his own as he shook his head slowly. He tapped his thumb on the counter and laughed darkly. "You just don't get it, do you?"

"Oh, I get it," Brennan nodded with a grunting laugh of her own. She noted the muscular tension in his face, neck and shoulders, and she remembered seeing that wound-up kind of response in him before when he defended her in an argument with another man. She felt her own growing anger coil tightly in her chest as she wondered when precisely the tables had turned. "I get it quite well, Angel. The Slayer's wonderful. She can do no wrong in the world. She's perfect."

"Now, wait," he snapped. "I never said that."

"You didn't have to," Brennan countered, her jaw hardening as she thought he was about to launch on another impassioned defense of Buffy Summers. "Which should tell you something, Angel." She paused, shot him a look of clear annoyance and then shook her head. "You know, though? You're a goddamn fool if you don't think I can handle you on any day of the week. Need I remind you, Angel, that I was handling Angelus long before that insipid little twit's great-great grandmother was even born?"

"Handling?" he asked with a crooked smirk. "You were always good at handling me, lass. I can't deny that. But you know that's not what...or who...I'm talking about here."

Glaring at him, Brennan guffawed, "The day I need some peroxidic dullard to do anything for me is the day I'm going to know it's time to finally do myself in because even I have my standards, Angel. So, how about this? How's about if Angelus does manage to get free again because you got weak and gave in and fucked the Slayer again, go all happy—well, if that does happen again, let's see what happens if and when Angelus shows up. Because, somehow, I'm not that worried. I handled him just fine, thank you, more than a century ago, and I've no reason to believe the same isn't true now," she told him with a touch of her old arrogant self-assurance that had always inflamed and infuriated both Angelus and Angel pushing the sadness out of her voice.

Angel's nostrils flared as his nose filled with the peppery scent of her rising ire. Her blue eyes had darkened to the color of indigo and her apple-shaped cheeks were flushed and rosy with emotion. He felt the hair on his arms stand on end as a tightness coiled low in his belly. He grunted at the faint tugging sensation behind his navel and leveled a rigid stare at her.

"You have no fucking clue, Bren," he said with a biting anger leeching into his voice. "This is one of those 'be careful what you ask for' situations, Bren. Don't you get that? Because if he ever gets free again, it'll..." Angel's voice trailed off as his eyes narrowed and he felt the darkness pulsing deep inside of him. "It won't be like it was before. The Angelus you knew back then? He was downright domesticated—mellow really—compared with the way he'd be. Like a chained-up junk yard dog all of a sudden let loose in an abattoir. You have no idea, Bren. None whatsoever."

"Well, we'll just have to see, I suppose," Brennan said, seemingly dismissing his point with a very casual wave of her hand. "Well," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Since all hell broke loose only after you fucked the little teenage twit, I suppose I'm safe for now. Unless you're telling me you've already got another encounter with your underage little bimbo already penciled into your busy social calendar, hmmm?" She pursed her lips before she stared at him for another minute and then shook her head before she added, "What's next—teaching her how to give you a blowjob the way you loved to be sucked off without her suffocating to death from her gag reflex because your dick is too big for her mouth?" She stopped again, then looked away from him and then sighed, "You know what, Angel. I just don't understand you sometime. I don't get is how you say that things are over in Sunnydale in one sentence, and in the next you're singing the Slayer's praises. So, forgive me, Angel. But, I seriously doubt things are over between you two...at least as much as you say they are. The simple fact of the matter is, even if you really wanted them to be over, how can you really know that they are? Can you really know you'll never run into the Slayer again? Because, somehow, I get the distinct impression that if you were in the same room with her for more than sixty seconds, she'd have you ensnared like some goddamn Siren all over again."

"You think so?" he growled, taking a couple of steps to close the distance between them. He tilted his head to the side, licked his lips as he inhaled a whiff of her spicy perfume and smirked. His eyes had darkened to the color of molten pitch, and flickered with a cocky laughter as they met hers. Angel could feel her breath on his chin and, noting the way rapid pace of her breathing, his gaze was drawn downward to her chest. Her red spaghetti-strap tank top left little to the imagination, and he felt his groin tighten and his fingertips tingle as he saw the contour of her pert nipples through the thin fabric. "You think you know what I want? Hmm? Or who I want? Hmmmm?"

"I think that the only reason you're here is because you can't, in good conscience without taking a big hit to your pride and huge male ego for whatever reason, be with her right now," Brennan said. "So, yeah, I think you're looking for a way to bide the time."

"You're so full of shit, Bren," he snarked. "You really think that, after all this time? Don't be dense. You know what's between us. You can feel it." He took another step closer. "You can feel it, that energy between us. It's always there. You can feel it." He raised his chin with a crooked smirk and lazily raked his hand through his hair. "Yeah, 'cause I sure as fuck can feel it," he said, his voice dropping a half-octave as he drew his tongue along his teeth suggestively. "Come on, Bren. I can smell it, and I know you can, too. Admit it."

"What do you want me to admit?" she asked, wincing faintly as she heard the huskiness in her own voice. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she felt a flash of liquid warmth ripple through her. "That you can fuck to pass the time just as easily as doing anything else? Then, sure, okay. No problem. I admit that."

Angel's jaw tightened again as he stared at her, his look so pointed it seemed that if it could, it will drill completely through her and break her in two. "That's not what I'm talking about and you fucking know it," he growled. "Come on—don't play games. Not now. You know what this is—what we're talking about here. You and me. Not anyone else, Bren. Just us. So go ahead. Admit it."

"What do you want me to admit?" she snapped back. "Hmm? What is it, Angel?"

"I want you to admit what we are!" he grunted, tilting his head to the side as his brown eyes burned black as they stared hard into hers. "That what we have, you and me, is bigger, deeper, and better than what either of us is foolish enough to think we can find somewhere else. With someone else. I want you to admit that this is unique, this thing that we have, this thing that we are."

"If it's so fucking unique," Brennan growled. "Then, why were you the first one to walk away? If you recall, you were the one who took a detour in the Land of Sunny Seventeen Year-Old Virgins and not me. I waited for you to come back. You didn't."

"Why did I walk away?" he asked. "Because you went and had tea and crumpets with Darla. Darla, for fuck's sake! Darla, who fucking left me high and fucking dry in Romania, and then when I went to China to meet up with her again, she dropped me like a fucking hot potato." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "She washed her hands of me, left me sitting there with the vampire posse on my tail, and you decide to wax all nostalgic about old times and sit down for tea with her, chit-chatting about me? After everything she did to me. After she betrayed me. You know she betrayed me. You said so yourself. We talked about it that first night in Chicago. For fuck's sake, Bren."

"Fuck, Angel!" she yelled. "We argued. It was stupid goddamn fight. That's all it was...over Darla of all people. You overreacted, tossed me out of your place, and slammed the door shut without a backward glance before I even had a chance to explain what was really going on and why I agreed to meet with her in the first place."

Angel was just about ready to unleash a sarcastic retort when he suddenly hesitated. His dark, heavy brows knit low over his deep-set eyes as her words percolated through the layers of his mind and his mouth fell open in awkward surprise. His forehead creased as he glanced to the side in confusion. He felt foolish as he realized that he, in fact, had no real idea what Brennan and his sire had discussed when they'd met. As soon as he'd heard that his lover had invited Darla over for tea on the latter's visit to Chicago, he flew into a rage so intense that he had never bothered to ask or listen for details before shoving her out the door and slamming it behind her.

"Then, adding insult to injury, you spent three months brooding, ignoring every call, letter, and email I sent you. And, then, when you were done pouting, you went and shacked up with the first wide-eyed teenage ingenue that you bumped into. So you tell me...what exactly was I supposed to do with that? Sit here, twiddling my thumbs in Chicago, waiting for you to fuck...what was that great name that Spike had for her?" Brennan snapped her fingers. "Oh, yeah. Slutty the Vampire Slayer. That was it. You wanted me to wait for you to fuck Slutty the Vampire Slayer out of your system? Well, I'm sorry. But, that wasn't going to happen. No man gets to treat me that way, not even you."

Angel's lower jaw shifted forward as he felt the muscles of his face and jaw tighten like a vise around his temples. Brennan watched his reaction as the corners of her lips curved upwards in quiet satisfaction.

"You aren't that important, Angel," she said. "You never were and never will be."

For several long seconds, he stared at her, his nostrils flaring as his dark eyes smoldered in fury. "You know that's not true," he said, pounding his fist on the countertop. "You know it, and I know it. No matter what happens, Bren, no matter who walks through our lives, hmmm? If we've learned anything, it's that we can't walk away. Sure, I learned the hard way." He pressed his lips in a firm line, cocking his head to the side as he grinned faintly and licked his lips. "I learned my lesson. And I think you did, too."

"Don't do that," Brennan snapped, stepping away from him as she glared at him. "Don't you fucking dare do that. You know I hate it when you do that."

"What?" he asked her, taking another half-step towards her.

Pointing at him with her index finger, she gestured as she said, "That thing you do. That thing you've always done where you try to turn this around on me and make me distracted so that I let the point drop. Well, it won't work this time. Because I've changed, Angel, and that little thing you do won't work with me anymore. We won't be conveniently glossing over the fact that you left me for her. Voluntarily. Without a second goddamn thought. And, we both know you'd do it again in a heartbeat if you had the chance."

"That's bullshit," he hissed. "Fucking utter bullshit, and you know it. And you think I don't know you? You think you've changed? Bullshit. I've known you for almost 150 years. After all that time, I know you almost as well as you know yourself." He grunted out a laugh. "Never mind that I've been carrying a part of you around with me for the better part of a century. So come on, Bren..."

"You're the one who's full of shit, Angel," she bit back. "I thought I knew you, I really did. I thought you were a man of a certain sophistication, but after hearing how you ran off with that teenage flake out there in Sunnydale, I was clearly wrong. You're no different than the rest of them."

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Bren. I didn't leave you for anyone." He shook his head with a huff. "You know I'm not like the rest of them, and you know what we have isn't—"

"Oh, no," she hissed, cutting him off. "Who in the hell do you think you are to—"

"Look," he said with a sigh, cutting her off as he lifted his hand to her face but hesitating for several seconds before touching her jaw with his fingers. It was the first time that he'd touched her after over a century in hell, and his hand shook slightly as he savored the softness of her skin and the way touching her made him feel.

She sensed his hesitation—even if she didn't know what had caused it—and then batted his hand away from her. "Don't touch me," she warned him. "You don't get to touch me."

"You never stopped me before," he said, greedy for the opportunity to touch her again as his hand hovered near her skin. "Well, there was that one time, but after that, you never stopped me from touching you." Angel narrowed his eyes. "You like it when I touch you. Actually, you love it when I touch you. You always have. From that very first night. You know it. I know it. You know that I know that you know it, so cut it out, Bren. You're pissed, okay? I get it. But don't bullshit me with this 'don't touch me' crap. I know you want me to touch you. I can feel it, the way your body's humming for me. The way you smell when you're turned on. You want me to touch you."

"I'm not taking a teenager's sloppy seconds, Angel," she hissed at him. "You may not have any self-respect left, but I do."

His brow sank hard over his dark eyes as his jaw turned rigid. "What do you want me to say, Bren, hmmm?" he snarled. "That I made a mistake? Or do you want me to admit I loved her? What do you want to hear? Because the bottom fucking line is, both are true. I loved her, but she betrayed me, and I realized that the trust I placed in her was a huge mistake. We aren't supposed to be together, her and I, and probably weren't ever meant to be. I was the one who left her, and you know what? If I had it to do all over again I'd make the exact same choice. So how's that, huh? Or do you want me to tell you what she was like, and that you were always better than her? Because that's true, too."

He paused, then shrugged to himself as his nostrils flared as he inhaled the spicy scent of Brennan's anger.

"She wasn't terribly original, really," he said. "Not when she was happy, and certainly not when she was pissed. I mean, she did throw me off a balcony once, just like you did. Not as gracefully as you did, actually, but she did manage to do it. And then there was a time or two when she trussed me up in chains." He paused, then held the tip of his tongue between his lips as his eyes skimmed over the contours of Brennan's tense, angry features. He felt a hard tugging in the pit of his belly and a tingle in his fingertips as he desperately yearned to touch her and to feel her touch him. "But that never turned out to be any fun. I mean, at least when you strung me up I knew that we'd end up fucking at some point. But you're right. She was...she was never able to match me. It was always an unequal relationship. She was never like you. Never as good as you. Nothing about her ever was. How she felt? When we were together? It wasn't the same."

"Of course it wasn't the same," Brennan snapped. "I've been around the block a few more times than she has. But then again, there's nothing quite like breaking them in for the first time, is there, Angel?"

His eyes widened, and then narrowed again as he felt the taste of bile rise in his throat at the insinuation. Angel swallowed, and he realized some of the sourness in his throat was not just the taste of his own response, but a twinge of hurt behind the strong scent of her anger. "Wait, you think that's what that was?" he snarled, his nostrils flaring as his eyes caught the bright flash behind hers. "You think I went after her because she was a virgin?"

"True, she wasn't a nun," she volleyed back. "But, close enough in this day and age, right? Untouched, untainted...you could corrupt her. Isn't that what it always was about?"

"Huh," Angel grunted, leaning in close to her, rolling his shoulder back and raising his chin as he tried to shake off the pulse of desire he felt crackle at the base of his spine. He blinked, realizing in that moment that her rising anger was as arousing sexually as it was emotionally. "First off," he said with a swallow. "It was never really about the sex, you know, for Angelus—the thing with the nuns. It was about pushing people over the fucking edge so far they'd never find themselves again, then snuffing them out once they'd realized how far they'd gone. He always got off on that—at least, he did before he met you. After he met you, there was no convent or nun in the world that excited him the way you did." He paused, then shook his head as he blinked away a memory. "But enough about that, alright? Shit."

"You're right," she said. "Let's talk about you. Talk about you and the oh-so-special Slayer that you've spent more than three years panting after."

"Panting after?" He shook his head, then sighed, closing his eyes for a second as he tried to ignore the vague tightness that was starting to get more and more powerful in his groin. "Look, she was special to me," he finally admitted. "You know that. I wouldn't have lost my soul if she wasn't."

Rolling her eyes as she attempted use her display of mockery to keep her anger in check, Brennan said, "Right. And, let me guess. This is the part where you tell me how fucking good she was...how good she tasted?"

His eyes skated down from Brennan's face to the shimmering ivory skin of her neck. "Yeah, I tasted her," he confessed, unsure as soon as the words left his mouth why he'd said it. His nostrils flared as he saw her eyes narrow at hearing his admission, and in a second wave of impulse, he opened his mouth again to speak. "But it's not what you think."

"How stupid do you think I am, Angel?" she asked. "I'm pretty sure it's exactly what I think."

Angel shrugged. "No, it wasn't like that," he said. "With her, it was plain-vanilla. We had sex, okay, but it wasn't fucking. There was no fire, no heat, no electricity." He thought back to the cold, rainy night he made love to Buffy in his dimly-lit apartment. "I held back. I had to, you know. But when it was over, I still felt...I dunno...unfulfilled. I came, of course, but...it wasn't enough."

Brennan rolled her eyes. "Well, isn't that a pity," she snorted. "You lose your soul over a mediocre fuck? How tragic." Her eyes then flashed and then said, "I suppose the stupid twit probably hadn't even gotten herself off before you went to town on her right? Was it a magic moment, Angel? Was that it? Did you get her to come for her first time in addition to being the first stiff dick to ram it inside her? Spike said she's always quite mouthy. So, tell me...did that, at least, shut her up when you were going down on her? I know you're just dying to tell me."

He felt her jealous rage rolling off of her in waves, but he knew silence would not mollify her. "It wasn't like that," he said again, his discomfort making his chest painfully tight.

"The fuck it wasn't," she sneered.

"I fed on her," he blurted out. "I drank from her. She was...it was...it was, well...it's the type of experience that's hard to describe."

"Lucky for me, I'm certain you're having a fucking good time trying," Brennan snarled. "Jesus, Angel. After all the shit you've given me over the years...you fed on her? You trusted her enough that you did that? How often? Was it every time you fucked her after you popped her cherry? Was that some type of kink she got off on? Was that it?"

"No," he snapped back. "It wasn't that. It wasn't...fuck, it wasn't like that at all. Get a grip, Bren. Damn it."

The muscles in Brennan's face were so rigid as she glared at him, her cheek twitched.

Angel felt the heat as her anger and tension radiated off of her. "I was hurt, alright?" he said, his voice low and vaguely uneven as he struggled to explain. "Okay? I'd been poisoned. It was...less than two weeks ago, Bren. There was an arrow that I got hit with that was coated in some kind of...I don't know, a poison. And I was dying, for fuck's sake. The only cure was if I drank from a Slayer. I needed her blood to heal. And even then, I didn't want to do it. I refused. That—feeding like that—was something I've never wanted from her. I flat out refused to do it. 'Get away,' I told her. She had to hit me with three fucking painful right hooks square in the jaw before she got me to do what she wanted. So I fed on her. Not because I wanted to, b ut because I had to. But that was it. It...it wasn't about sex...not at all."

Brennan heard something in his voice, a hesitation, and as the hair on the back of her neck stood on end, her eyes narrowed to slits and she pounced. "So," she said with venom dripping from her voice. "You're going to tell me that she sat in a chair in her Sunday best with her legs crossed and let you take a drink from her?"

Angel blinked as he remembered the night he fed on the Slayer. A second after he blinked, he saw a bright flash in Brennan's blue eyes, and he knew he was a goner. "No," he sighed. "It wasn't...she was...she had a tank top on...a plain black one, I think. But why are you—?"

"What were you wearing, Angel?" she hissed, unable to shake from her mind the image of him, his naked body glistening with sweat, tucked between the adolescent Slayer's slender thighs, his back arched as he drank from her. She had to know if the image in her mind was accurate. "Tell me."

"Bren," he said, his voice low and raw as he pleaded with her as some of the anger he'd felt earlier dissipated. "Please. Don't do this. It's not—"

"Tell me," she demanded again, the raw anger and hostility and resentment she was feeling bubbling up and flowing through her as she glared at him. "Tell me now."

Angel swallowed heavily and then said, "Fine. You wanna know? Fine. Then, I'll tell you everything. I'd been in bed, Bren, sweating like a fiend as the poison worked its way through my body. I-I..."

"Were you naked?" she asked evenly as she stared at him, cutting him off again so she could learn the details she really wanted to know about his most recent encounter with the Slayer. "Were you?"

"No," he whispered. "I wasn't. I had pants on." He stared back at her, his mouth hanging open as he waited for her to press him for all the details, as he knew she would.

Brennan's jaw hardened as she asked, "Did you take her on your bed? Is that where you started to fuck her? Was that when it happened? Did you feed on her in your bed?"

"No," Angel answered. "She wanted me to do it there—feed on her, not fuck her, Bren—but I said no. I didn't want to feed on her at all, so I got up and went into the other room. I could barely walk, the poison had so weakened me, and—"

"Where did you do it, then?" she asked, leveling a hard, piercing stare at him as the fury roiled inside of her. "Tell me, Angel. Where?"

Closing his eyes for several moments, he remembered how Buffy's third hard punch had nearly knocked him over, and how when he'd turned to face her again, the demon inside of him had torn away the veil of his humanity. He'd faced her with a lips curled back in hungry rage, a twisted brow and yellow eyes that flashed in the half-light of the room. He winced and explained, "I bit her—standing up, but we fell to the ground, and I drank from her. On the floor. In front of the fireplace."

"In front of the fireplace?" Brennan laughed. "You have quite a penchant for fucking in front of fireplaces, don't you? Is that where you took her the first time you fucked her? Did you—"

"No, wait," he said, throwing his hands up and cutting her off before she could launch into a full-on rant. " Listen, okay?" He swallowed again, knowing he could never hide the truth from her, even if he'd wanted to. He thought of how he'd covered Buffy's body with his, his hips cradled between her thighs, as he surrendered himself to his body's thirst.

"I fell on her...I-I collapsed on top of her, and I drank from her," Angel explained. "But you've gotta understand, Bren, I was desperate, acting on pure instinct—I was dying, and once I started drinking...I drank a lot. I just couldn't stop. She tasted so good, so sweet, that Slayer's blood of hers. I just needed more...all she had to give. And so I kept sucking, so much, that when I was done..." He closed his eyes and remembered how he'd rolled off of her and onto his back, his lips wet with her blood as he felt her life-force dampening the killing effects of the poison. "I nearly killed her," he said miserably. "She'd lost consciousness, and her pulse was very weak. I had to take her to the hospital." He pursed his lips, then added, "I couldn't let her die, Bren—I couldn't. She saved my life. And that was the only thing that made me eventually pull away and get myself together long enough to get her to the ER. She saved me, and then I saved her. It was the right thing to do, Bren. I didn't want to owe her. I wanted to be free."

Brennan groaned at Angel's words. "Well, isn't that nice?" she sneered eventually, her fists clenched tight at her sides, obviously resentful and hurting because of what Angel had just said. "The self-sacrificing heroine swoops in to save the life of the dark, brooding, dying vampire who took her maidenhood and—"

Angel shook his head and raised his hand in objection. "Now wait just a goddamn minute," he said. "That's not how it was..." He let his hand drop and looked away. "It was never sexual."

"Bullshit," she snorted. "You drank from her. How can you dare tell that that's not sexual after all the times you've sucked and fucked me?" She stared at him, her cool eyes burning with jealous anger. "And all the times you've enjoyed it."

"Because it wasn't like that," he grunted, interrupting her. "It wasn't sexual, Bren..."

Brennan's pale eyes flashed bright as her square jaw hardened. "You said you were laying on top of her," she growled, the image she had in her mind of the two of them so clear that she almost swore she'd been there herself. "Your hips between her legs, I imagine. Hmmm? Am I wrong? When you leaned over as you would have had to, logistically, to drink from her, you covered her body with yours. Isn't that so?"

Angel turned away, biting down on the inside of his lip as he closed his eyes, remembering the way it had felt to feed on his the Slayer. "Yes," he sighed, then brought his dark gaze, faintly glassy with a frustrated sadness, back again to meet hers.

"Was she wearing a bra?" she asked, her lip curling as she could see in the way his eyelid twitched that the unspoken answer to her question was 'no.' Undaunted, and emboldened by the momentum of her anger, she pressed on. "Tell me," she said, a sneer cutting the edge of her firm voice. "Were you grinding against her, your hips against hers as you dragged your bare chest over her breasts? Could you feel her hard nipples through her thin tank top as you moved on top of her? Tell me, Angel. Tell me."

"Yes," he whispered, pained as he answered her question. "Yes, dammit—"

"Right." Brennan cocked her head to the side and she leaned her weight into one hip, adopting an aggressive stance that oozed defiance and skepticism. "How about that, huh? I was right. Just like I knew I would be."

Angel looked away, his eyes scanning the apartment behind him before his gaze settled on the brick fireplace on the opposite side of her living room, and he remembered vaguely the way the fire in his fireplace had warmed his skin while he drank from the Slayer. After a moment, he thought back to another night, a hundred and forty years earlier, when he found himself between the legs of another woman in front of a roaring fire—the night he first came together with Brennan.

"You can say what you want, Angel," she said, "but if that doesn't sound like a prelude to fucking then I don't know what does. So, don't give me this crap about how it wasn't sexual, Angel. I'm not a fucking idiot. So tell me...did you slide your hands under her top?"

He blinked back at her, his mouth gaping open as he remembered how it was when he'd fed on the Slayer, and how one hand held her down as the other was pressed against the concrete floor, propping him up as he drank. "No," he said, his voice suddenly low and measured. "She fell down and then she was laying on the floor where she'd fallen, except that I'd fallen on top of her, more or less."

Brennan's brow furrowed. "More or less?" she huffed. "What the fuck does that mean, Angel? Did you or didn't you lay on top of her, hmmm?" Her chest heaved with each breath as she looked at him, demanding an answer with her withering stare.

Angel's smoldering eyes narrowed, and he raised his chin defiantly. "Yes," he hissed. "I did. I bit her neck as we were standing there, but I was so weak from the poison and the way it hit me, I guess, all at once, tasting human blood again after going so long without, and Slayer blood at that...it's got a texture that's kind of...well, I can't really explain the sensation of it—"

Brennan raised her hand in front of her face as she took a step back with an exasperated sigh.

"Don't bother," she said. "I don't want to hear about the intoxicating taste of her Slayer's blood..."

He growled and his dark eyes flickered bright with a flash of anger. "You asked, lass," he said, taking another step towards her as his voice sank a full octave, his long-faded brogue revealing itself once more on the raw edges of his speech. "You fuckin' asked, and now you get to fuckin' listen whether it makes you feel more jealous or not. So, yeah—I fell on top of her, my body covered hers as my fangs sank deep into her throat, and I drank. I drank. I didn't fuck her. I didn't grope her. I didn't grab her tits. I didn't rub her off. I didn't touch her sexually. I held her down on the floor and, with my teeth sunk into her jugular, I sucked her damn near dry." His nostrils flared wide as his eyes locked hard with hers. "I drank from her and with every swallow, I felt myself pullin' back from the edge of death. She saved my life, forcin' me to drink from her that way. Would you have preferred she let me die?" He clenched his jaw hard. "Would you rather have seen me dead? Would you?"

A thin, almost imperceptible fissure cracked the facade of Brennan's angry indifference. She blinked, but said nothing in the brief pause before Angel began to speak again. His brow furrowed hard over his eyes. "She saved my fuckin' life, Bren," he said, biting each word as he spoke, a certain lilt to the cadence of his words as his long-faded Galway brogue returned to him in his passion. "You gotta give her credit. She was willin' to give up her life to save me."

"You bastard," she spat at him, her fury blazing again. "You have the audacity to come into my home in the middle of the night, make a pass at me, and when I brush you off, regale me with tales of your new blonde true-love fuck buddy in Sunnydale, and then tell me that I need to get a grip?" Brennan propped her hands on her hips and leveled a cold, hard stare at her longtime lover. She shook her head as she gnashed her teeth. "Well, you know what, Angel?," she hissed. "Fuck you and the huge ego that you walked in with. Fuck. You."

"Fuck me?" he snorted.

His eyes skated up and down her body, taking note of every curve and swell that her skimpy sleep shorts and thin, snug-fitting tank top revealed. Each heaving breath she took made her breasts sway just enough that the movement caught his eye. Angel's eyes were drawn to the cleft between her breasts, and how the space between them glistened with sweat, a tiny droplet of perspiration clinging to her skin before finally being shaken loose by a falling breath.

"Fuck you, Bren," he said. "Fuck you and all your goddamn insecurities. You know, for someone who's damn near five hundred fuckin' years old, you'd think you'd be a bit more circumspect about these things and not go to fuckin' pieces, getting threatened by a seventeen year-old. Who, by the way, I've already admitted was a big fuckin' mistake. She was never as good as you...the way you taste, the way you feel. I tasted her less than ten days ago, and you'd think all I'd be able to remember was the taste and smell of her. But you know what? Even though it's been years since I tasted you? That's all I can think about, that's all I can remember. You. Just you. The way you feel and the way your blood tastes on my tongue. You were always better, Bren, in everything—so why are you so insecure about this, after everything I've told you? Why, huh?"

"That's it," Brennan snapped, turning around so that she was completely facing him. She extended the palms of both hands and shoved him hard away from her, pushing him towards the door. "We're done here. And, you're leaving now."

"No way," he said firmly, placing his hands on his hips as he shook his head with a cocky, narrow-eyed grin. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Want to bet?" she told him.

"What are you gonna do, lass?" he asked, his forehead creasing deeply as he rolled his eyes and laughed. "Throw me over the balcony again? Nah, that's no fun. Been there, done that, right? So what, maybe you wanna tie me up, just for old time's sake?"

"No," she said curtly. "I just want you gone. And, in about ten seconds after I say the magic four words, we both know there's nothing you can do about it."

Angel narrowed his eyes once more. "Nope," he said simply, then cocked his head with a grin as he took a firm step forward and closed the space between them again, bringing his big hands to rest on her hips, closing his fingers around her waist as his eyes darted down to look at the way her scoop-necked camisole revealed the sweat-damp cleft between her breasts. He grunted quietly as he felt the tugging low in his gut, behind his navel, become sharper and more painful as his body began to harden as he felt how her possessive anger had made her body rigid, taut beneath its curves.

"I mean it, Angel," she growled at him. "It may've been a while since you weren't trying to fuck a docile, dimwitted airhead who bought into that whole knight-in-shining-armor brooding thing you do so very well. But, I'm telling you now. Take your goddamn hands off of me or you're going to recall going off of my balcony as a pleasant memory by the time I'm done with you."

A faint smile flashed across his lips as he squeezed her hips in his hands and leaned in, brushing his lips across her chin. "No."

She twisted against his grasp, trying to get away from him, but he held firm. "You don't get to have me," she told him.

"I've always had you," he said, leaning in again as his lips hovered just fractions of an inch from hers. "Always."

"No," she contradicted him. "No. You're wrong."

Shaking his head as he gave her a sly smile. "Never," he told her. "I want you."

"No," she repeated. "Go back to the fucking Slayer if you want to get laid," Brennan snarled. "I don't want you. Go back to her. You said it yourself. You've both fucked her and fed on her. What more do you want?"

"You," he growled, his mouth gaping open as he pressed his fingertips hard into her flesh. He took a whiff and filled his nose with the smell of her sweet, spicy sweat and the musky scent of her mounting arousal, and he felt the silky smoothness of her skin warm his hands as he squeezed her hips. His eyes drank in the sight of her chest rolling with every breath, a bead of sweat dribbling along the right side of her neck and coming to rest on her collarbone. "I want you. Only you."

"Too bad," she muttered at him. "The price you'd have to pay to get that back is something we both know you're not willing to put up, Angel. So...Let. Me. Go."

"Price?" he laughed, not being able to believe what she was actually saying and reveling in the way she felt in his arms as she struggled in his grasp. He held her tighter as he continued, "I've already paid the price, lass. Again and fucking again. Most recently, for over a century, remember? So, no, I'm not letting you go and, yeah, not only do I want you, but I'm gonna have you, too. Again...and again...and again."

"I told you...no," she muttered as she again struggled against him. Brennan wanted him with every fiber of her being, and a part of her hated herself for giving into her own weakness. Despite her anger, she wanted him, and she loathed herself for it despite the promise that she had long ago made to herself that she wouldn't ever take the Slayer's sloppy seconds after the night she talked to Spike made it clear that Angel had embarked on a passionate affair with a certain blonde teenager in Sunnydale. She had promised herself that she would never give in to her want of him as long as she was convinced there was even the slightest chance she might lose him again to Buffy Summers. Yet, here they were, and despite remaining unconvinced, she knew she was within an inch of giving into him and her unquenchable thirst for him. "What part of that don't you understand?"

"The part of you that tells me that what you're saying and what you really want are two totally fucking different things, woman." He stared hard into her eyes, and behind the cold fire of her rage, he saw something else—a hairline crack in her resolve, which fracture seemed to reveal a fleeting glimpse of the familiar want that she'd shown him over the many years he'd known her―the want that had always been the starting point between them as it had always led to other things. Angel knew he needed to tread carefully, but the familiar glimpse gave him hope that he could make something more than verbal sparring happen between them this night so they could move forward together.

"What price do you want, huh? Tell me. What do you want, mmm?"

She narrowed her eyes and stared at him for several seconds. "You said you fed on her when you were injured," she said evenly.

"I did," he said firmly. "That's what I did."

"So, you're saying you never fed on her when you were fucking her?" she asked. holding his intense gaze. "Is that what you're telling me?"

Angel tilted his head to the side and then replied, "Yeah. That's exactly what I'm saying."

"Why?" she questioned him sharply. "Why not? Afraid of letting the demon out of his cage long enough to make her come, Angel? Was that it? Were you afraid she couldn't handle it...handle you?"

For several long moments, he said nothing, and as each second passed, the angry gleam in her eyes flashed brighter. Finally, he said, "I never shared that with her," he said. "I never bared myself that way for her. She never earned the right to see all of me, that way, the way you have. The darkness that's..." He paused and then looked away as he shook his head. "But we both know that's the last thing either one of us needs right now, Bren. It's not happening."

"What?" she said. "Don't tell me. Are you saving it for the Slayer, Angel? Is that why you won't give it to me?"

"No," he insisted with a frown. "That's not it at all, Bren. I just—"

"Then, you're going," Brennan retorted instantly. "Because you want to know what my price is? That's it. Prove it. Prove you know and care about me differently than you do her. Prove it. Or get out."

"Bren," he murmured, still somewhat shaken by how close he'd come to killing the Slayer after feeding on her, and uncomfortable with Brennan using his willingness to feed as a sign of his bona fides., afraid he might do the same thing to her and terrified at the possibility. "I really don't...this isn't...look, I-I..."

She leveled a hard gaze at him, her eyes a dark indigo-gray, the color of blued steel, as she began to mutter, "Fine. Then, you're going," she repeated. "And, I'm quite happy to use my powers to do it. A spell isn't always strange words and incantations. Sometimes, it can be very simple, Angel. Just four little words. I rescind—"

"No!" he shouted, reaching out and grabbing her arm. He pulled her towards him with a hard yank until their foreheads were almost touching. "Don't," he warned her.

Pursing her lips, she dared him, "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't."

"Because," he answered her. "If you get rid of me, then you won't get what you say you really want. Remember? You just said you want to see the darkness in me, Bren? Is that what you want? You want me to take you with all of the darkness I have in me? Is that what you really want?"

"I'm not afraid of the darkness—or the demon, Angel," she countered. "I never was and never will be. And, I think you've forgotten that. I've seen both of them before, remember? Up close and personal. On more than one occasion."

"I've forgotten nothing," he growled, leaning in closer to her. "I remember everything. Everything."

"Every time," she retorted sharply. "Every fucking time, Angel, I've matched you. For a damn century and a half, I've matched you step for step, move for move, beat for beat. I'm not some goddamn teenage twit. So, either give me what I'm due or get the fuck out of my home."

"I'll give you what you're due," he grunted, pressing his fingers into her arm hard enough it would leave bruises. He felt his mouth water at the thought of coating his tongue with her blood again as he realized he'd already decided he was going to agree to her terms. "I haven't tasted human blood since Angelus got loose," he said. "So be careful what you wish for, lass, because you might just get it."

"I told you," she nodded at him. "I'm not scared of the demon, Angel. Besides, it's not like I haven't purged your palate with my blood before," Brennan said with a lopsided grin and a hint of laughter in her voice. "After all of the meals you took as Angelus, I think you need this as badly as I do. Difference is, I'm willing to admit it, Angel." She arched an eyebrow and said, "So, I ask you again—are you going to give me what I'm due?"

Angel felt a warmth spread through his belly as a prickly heat bit at his skin and a raw shiver rolled up his spine. A lusty grin flashed across his lips as he flexed his fingers and squeezed her arm again, pulling her body flush against his so he could feel her breasts pressing against his chest. "Yeah, I'll give it to you," he said with a low, throaty laugh. "God, I want you," he growled. "Always have."

His nostrils flared as they filled with the smell of her sweat, and he felt the field of his vision suddenly narrow as his brow thickened and sunk low over his eyes, his lips burning slightly as his mouth tingled and his teeth ached for a moment before his grin transformed into a jagged-toothed, sharp-fanged snarl.

"I'll give you proof," he said, letting his tongue slide over his fangs as he lowered his head to her neck and, hesitating only for a fraction of a second as he felt her pulse vibrate against his lower lip, opened his mouth wide before sinking his fangs into the silky skin of her neck.

He came at her hard and fast—and he almost got away with it.

Brennan shuddered against him, letting her hair fall away from the crook on the right side of her neck as she tilted her head away from him. In sixty years, since the very first night she bared her neck to him, he'd always fed in the same two places―the right side of her neck, or the creamy swell of her left leg's inner thigh. As she felt his teeth pierce her skin, her knees wobbled a bit. It wasn't because it was an unpleasant or even unfamiliar sensation, but she did start to feel a bit lightheaded as he began to drink from her in a more ruthless and more desperate way then she could ever remember him having done before. After a minute, as he continued to drink from her greedily, she felt the lightheadedness transition to a strong wave of dizziness.

"Angel," she breathed, offering him a soft warning that she'd never had to give him before, and a small part of her mind that was still not subsumed by the throbbing want between her legs found it curious that such a warning appeared to be necessary. "Go easy..."

After a minute, it was very clear that he hadn't heard a word she'd said as he pressed his weight harder against her and sank his fangs deeper into her neck, slurping loudly as he drank.

"Angel―" she repeated, this time another different type of edge coming into her voice. "Slow down."

Again, he disregarded her words and continued to drink. When she felt her heartbeat begin to grow faint, Brennan didn't wait or give him a third chance to ignore her.

Her eyes snapped open, pulsing with the tell-tale sign of her powers. She twisted away slightly at the same time a small but concentrated pulse of blue energy leapt from her body and flew towards Angel, parting the two of them. Angel slammed hard against the stainless steel door of her refrigerator, hitting it with a hard thud. His head snapped up, his bright yellow eyes meeting hers with a predatory glare. Brennan leveled her own hard stare at him, the irises of her eyes completed blocked out as electric blue orbs stared down his bright yellow gaze.

"I told you," she said, her voice confident and measured as she stalked toward him. "We're equals, Angel. Give and take."

"I...can't...help...it," he groaned as he struggled to come up with an explanation for her. "I-I...I need you," he told her lamely. "Bren, God, I-I need to taste you. To touch you. I want you...so fucking badly. Please."

"Mmmmm," Brennan answered. "All well and good. But, despite what you said earlier, it seems as if you've forgotten that we're only equals because I give what I want to you and let you take the rest."

She tilted her head as she raised a hand and a stainless steel knife flew into it as if a web of blue electricity had drawn it to her. She then pounced, slamming his back against the refrigerator, growling as she brandished the knife and quickly shredded the shirt he was wearing. She tossed the knife on the far counter with a loud metallic clack echoed in the air and ran her hands over his naked chest. Using her knee to part his legs, she allowed herself to straddle one thigh as she settled herself against his outthrust knee. When she was satisfied with her positioning, she quickly gathered the hem of her camisole in both hands, tugged it over her head, and tossed it on the ground behind her. She saw Angel's tongue loll at the corner of his mouth as his eyes fell to her tits, her dusky nipples already taut, although they tightened a bit more as she saw him stare at them.

"Now...come here," she demanded, her voice reduced to a throaty growl. "You want to touch me, taste me, want me? Then, fine. Do it. I want you, too. Because we're most definitely not done here yet."

Angel snarled once at her, but did as she bade, thrusting his knee up into her even as she wrapped her hands around his neck and pulled him towards her. Brennan felt a tightening in her stomach that started to increase as she felt the hardness of his muscular chest press against her delicate skin.

While she still had the mental capacity to do so, she pressed her lips against his cheek and murmured, "Now...go easy this time. Don't get too impatient. We both know it'll taste sweeter the closer you get to getting me off."

"You talk too damn much, woman," he growled against her skin. "Way too goddamn much."

"And, if you want to suck me dry then maybe you need to make it worth my while," she muttered. "Now."

He grunted as his hands fell to her hips, and he tugged at the waistbands of the cotton sleep shorts she wore and, underneath them, the simple pair of white string bikinis she come to favor in recent years. He shifted―despite her sharp rumble of protest―and their bodies parted enough that he could push the offensive clothing articles down to her ankles. Not to be outpaced, she reached for his jeans, and had managed to unbutton them, pull the zipper lose, and had just begun tugging at them when he growled again. Yellow eyes met steel blue as he moved with lightning fast speed so that not only did he divest himself of his socks, shoes, jeans, and boxer briefs, but he grabbed for Brennan and lifted her against the refrigerator door.

"You...are a jealous...and demanding...bitch," he growled at her as he used his hands to position her so that she was at the right height for what they both wanted him to do to her. She could feel the wet tip of his swollen cock poking against the undercurve of her ass as he dug his fingers into the soft swell of her cheeks in a way that marked her as his yet again.

"Two...of my more...redeeming...qualities," she muttered as she twisted against him, trying to find some relief for the mild pulsing that had increased to a steady throbbing in the short span of about five minutes.

When she was unable to get any satisfaction, Brennan let out a small howl of frustration. She moved to slip one of her hands away from his head so that she could reach between them to touch her clit. However, as soon as she moved―almost as if he'd sensed it―Angel thrust his hips forward as he used his pelvis to leverage her against the appliance door. He let his hands fall away from her ass as he brought them up to grab hers. He quickly pinned them above her head.

"No," he muttered. "No, you don't."

"Why not, you bastard?" she snarled. "I want...I need..."

"No," he told her with a half-snarl in his voice. "Not yet."

"Why?" she repeated again. "I want to come...now."

"If I can't feed yet, you can't be fucked either," he told her. "And if you can't be fucked, you aren't going to come, so that's why."

"Who...said...you can't feed?" Brennan asked him. "Because I know it wasn't me."

Angel narrowed his eyes at her for a minute. She, just as she'd promised, matched him as she narrowed her own eyes. He tilted his head as he studied her for a few seconds. It turned out that he'd waited too long as she leaned her head out and smashed her mouth against his. She ran her tongue over his fangs, tasting the bitter and metallic taste of her own blood as she skated her tongue up the back of his fangs to the roof of his mouth. His own tongue met hers at that point, and he curled around the warm wetness of her attempt to invade and plunder his mouth. They battled each other for a minute before he bucked his hips toward hers. Even as he moved, she felt just enough friction against her swollen clit that she started to lose focus.

Her head fell away from his, her tongue falling out of his mouth as she whimpered. When he repeated the movement again, increasing the pressure as he pushed hard against her, her eyes grew wider as her eyes burned an even brighter blue. He had to turn his own gaze away from her, as the flash of light was too bright for him to look at without feeling a flash of pain. A familiar web of blue static enveloped them as she cracked, a thousand tiny flutters tugging at her belly as her climax came hard, fast and in jagged little puffs of sensation that made her breathing go ragged as it was almost too much sensory information for her mind to process.

When Angel realized that Brennan was growing slack against him because she'd come, he seized his opportunity. He again growled at her as he let his hands fall away from hers. He brought one to her back as he wrapped it around her to steady them while he used the other to guide his cock to her dripping entrance. When he'd lined himself up against her, he bared his fangs again with a snarl of triumph as he let his tip be sucked into the depth of her slick hole by an inch or two. However, he refrained from sliding home until he'd used his head to push hers to the side. She complied as if a rag doll, again barring the smooth expanse of skin to him that he'd long ago come to think of as his. Sinking his head a bit lower, he was careful to avoid her carotid artery even though he could feel the sweet pulsing of her life blood calling out to him. Instead, he half-kissed, half-licked his way from the curve of her neck to another favorite place he'd discovered some years before. He brushed the flat of his fangs against the soft skin just below her ear, and moved about an inch towards the back of her head where he found the pair of wounds he'd left just minutes earlier. When he was satisfied, he sunk his teeth into her, penetrating her with his fangs at the same time he pumped into her.

Brennan, already weak with repletion when he'd entered her and gone no further than a small distance past her rim, let out a panting yell when he pushed into her fully. Her hands had already come to rest on the sharp angle of his bony hips. When he began to piston in and out of her in a fairly ruthless manner, at the same time he began to feed on her once again, she dug her nails into the skin of his hips. She felt herself building towards another climax, even as she began to grow lightheaded from bloodloss.

"Ohhhh, fuck―" she grunted. "Angel..."

The sound of her crying his name was nothing more than a subtle gasp that was quickly drowned out by the thumping of her head, back, and ass hitting the cold metal of her refrigerator's door. She let out a series of incoherent pants that merely drove him to push harder and deeper into her with each thrust.

When, at last, he felt her walls clench around him, he leaned his head back and let his fangs fall away from her skin. Almost as if it had been a catalyst, as soon as he'd felt her come, he felt himself start to fall over the edge. He pumped in and out of her a few more times before he was certain he was beyond the point of no return.

Even as he moved inside her, he started to feel as if his skin was on fire from the inside out. Still, unable to help himself, he refused to move away from her. Instead, he redoubled his efforts as he drilled into her with a relentless precision that culminated with his aching balls finally achieving some relief as he started to come. Even as the tell-tale release of his body's fluids signaled his climax, he felt something he'd never felt before. The familiar blue energy of their couplings was nothing new. But, this time, even as he came, he felt some of the power emanating from her leap out and into him. If he could've seen himself, Angel would've noticed that two small sparks of energy had leapt from her eyes to his. Almost as if they were extinguishing the yellow fire that was raging in his eyes, the orbs entered his eyes, causing him to almost instantly feel his forehead relax as his fangs retreated. After a few seconds, he wore the face of a normal man―albeit flushed and sweaty―as he jerked into her one final time with one last growl.

"Fuck!"

At last, he stilled, and a fair amount of time passed before he smacked his lips together and lifted his head from where it had fallen forward on to the crook of her shoulder. He tilted his head just enough so that he could whisper in her ear, "Bren...I think...if I try to move at all...we're gonna fall."

She was quiet for several long moments. Although Angel could feel the warmth of her skin, the faint pulsing of her heartbeat, and the perspiration that covered her body in a fine sheen, he was still concerned when she didn't answer.

"Bren...?" he breathed.

She was again quiet for another moment before she uttered a single word. "Don't."

The haze of having just fed on and fucked the one person in the world who'd haunted his dreams and mind and heart in ways he'd never imagined possible made it more than slightly difficult for him to understand what she meant.

"Huh?"

This time...it was Brennan who took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, before she said, "Don't. Don't tell...me...that wasn't one of the best fucks we've...or you've...ever had."

Unable to help himself, Angel blinked a few times before he shook his head, with a lopsided grin on his handsome face. "Don't worry," he told her. "I won't."

"Good," she muttered. "Good."

He was quiet for another minute and then said softly, "Bren?"

"Yes?" came the breathy response.

"If I try to move...I think we'll fall," he told her again.

Smacking her lips, this time it was her turn to she gave him a bit of a smile before she said simply, "Then, let us fall."

Unable to hold them up any longer, he nodded as he tried to steady their joint slide down the smooth surface of the stainless steel appliance door until the ground came up to meet them. He fell away from her, landing on his ass as he fell into an awkward Indian-style seated position. For her part, Brennan remained with her back propped against the fridge door with her legs extended in front of her.

She stared at him for a long time, and then said, "Now...tell me...tell me you won't be thinking of me the next time you see that goddamn twit."

"I won't," he told her honestly. "I promise."

"Because...you're going to see her," Brennan said, more a statement then a question, before her brain realized what her mouth had said. Realizing it was too late to take it back, she pressed forward. "Aren't you?" she asked.

He exhaled a long slow sigh before he answered, "I'm not her secretary, and I can't keep track when she comes and goes, or control where she goes, even if I wanted to. So, yeah, it's possible...probable, actually, that I'll see her again. Especially since I'm just going down to L.A...eventually, that is."

"Why L.A., Angel?" she asked him. "If you really want to get away...why go to L.A.?"

He shrugged. "Uhhh...to answer your question, I don't know why it's L.A. It's as good a place as any...at least, for now." Angel saw a flicker in Brennan's pale eyes and shifted slightly as he started to realize that the tile of her kitchen's floor wasn't particularly comfortable. "Besides," he said quietly, "It's not like I've got any other place to go—do I?"

She winced as she stared at him for a minute and then looked away as she said quietly, "I don't know."

"I've gotten used to California, I guess," he said with a certain glumness in his voice. "And, besides, you've got your life here. You're almost done with your Ph.D, and your classes that you're teaching." Angel swallowed as he let his eyes settle again on the smooth, pink skin of her shoulders and down her chest until he saw her breasts heaving slightly with each breath of oxygen she greedily sucked down. "Besides, I know, you've got your professor...err...well, your friend."

Brennan's breathing slowed a bit as she looked up and hoped that her voice sounded normal as she asked, "You know about him?"

"Yeah, Bren," he said. "I know about Michael. You're not the only one who knows how to find things out about people." He hesitated for a moment, then added, "I checked him out. I wanted to know and so I just wanted to make sure he was...well...let's just say I checked him out."

"But, why?" she asked. "Why would you do that?"

"Why?" he repeated. "What do you mean 'why', Bren? Why would I do it? Someone has to look out for you. I did it because I care about you. I don't want you to get hurt. So, of course, I keep an eye on things where you're concerned."

Brennan was quiet for a minute and then said in a soft voice, "I-I...wasn't certain that it mattered to you anymore...that I mattered to you, like that, anymore. Because...you know that I haven't seen you since our last Halloween," she said, tentatively. "And, as I said, that was...awhile ago. Almost three years, Angel. Once upon a time, that wasn't so long for us not to see one another, but now? Since...well, since things changed for us. And, especially since when parted on bad terms the last time I saw you. It's...well, I mean..."

"I know," he said with a hint of sadness. "I know it was. It's been...well, like I said, a lot of things've happened." He stopped and looked away from her. "But, I meant what I said, Bren. It's all done. I'm...well, all of that, what happened the last three years in Sunnydale. It's over."

"Is it?" she asked. "Is it really? Because...after the last time...you seemed, well, you seemed very...involved there. I-I...I'd be lying if I said I expected to see you before the next Halloween in two years' time."

Angel shook his head slowly before he answered. "I was foolish, Bren," he said. "I let myself get sucked in, because I wasn't thinking. I was...I don't know."

"Young love...new love," she began hesitantly. "It can be very alluring because of the newness...the simplicity of it all. It can be very alluring and very...consuming."

He frowned. "It was all that, I guess," he said. He remained silent for a moment before looking up and into her eyes. "Do you love the professor, this guy you've been with the last couple of years? Or is it, you know, just recreational?"

"Michael's very intelligent," she said. "Very intelligent...and he's very compatible with the life I have here...my life, my work."

Angel blinked. "The implication being, I could never be that."

"Now, don't," she said sharply, taking a deep breath as she took another deep breath. "Don't do that. Don't go putting words in my mouth. I never said that."

"I thought about it, Bren," he said. "Instead of L.A., coming back to Chicago. But, I didn't want to be a burden on you. You have carved out a great life for yourself these last years, and...I think you're destined for great things. I didn't want to be a hindrance."

"You've never been a burden to me," she said. "Never. I haven't thought of you like that..ever. If you remember, you were the one who left before, remember? I wanted you to stay here, with me. You were the one who went. I wanted...I wanted to shape my life around you, but you wouldn't let me."

"I left so you could have the life you deserved," he said, "not the one you thought was possible with me holding you back. If I had stayed, you'd never have gone to Mexico, and done all the great things you did there."

Brennan swallowed heavily once and then told him, "I know that. But, that was then. This is now. So...why did you come here, Angel? Just for a good fuck? Because you didn't have anywhere else to go? Both? Why did you do it?"

Angel was quiet for a moment before he answered. "Because I wanted to see you," he said, his voice tinged with sadness. "Because no matter what I do, Bren, I still feel..." He shook his head, unable to piece together what he wanted to say. He sighed, then said, "So, Michael...does he...is this thing with him...is it serious?"

"Michael..." she began, trying to answer his question. "I-I...when I found out that you'd taken up with the Slayer―Spike came to see me not long after he got back from Brazil. I suppose he was feeling a bit lost himself since apparently Drusilla told him she was done with him. And, well...we had a long talk one night. When he left, I really thought that you were done with me. So...I'd been with Michael a few times...nothing serious. Just a way to pass the time, if you will. But, after that...I thought that I could use him to get over you. But, no matter how hard I tried to do that, I eventually realized that he looked enough like you that when I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was you even if I hated myself for doing it. And, so I just kept staying with him in this vicious cycle. We worked, we fucked, I hated myself for it, and I hated him for it because he wasn't you. We'd fight. We'd eventually make up, and the whole damn cycle would start all over again."

"Hmmmm," Angel murmured, not sure whether this revelation was good news or not. "Okay. So...where are you in this cycle right now?"

"With Michael?" she asked. Angel silently nodded his head. "No...he's...he's...well, we aren't even talking right now. We had a huge fight, and he's pissed at me."

"So...that would be the fighting part of it?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I guess."

"So, where does that leave us, Bren?" he inquired. "What about you and me?"

Brennan pursed her lips for a minute before she said with a sigh. "You know that I want you, but—"

"But what?" he asked. "Tell me. How do I put things right between us? How do I fix things?"

She gave him a long gaze as she studied him and then said, "Tonight's a good start. But...I'm not quite certain, Angel. So much is changing right now. I've been offered a job...and, well. It's not in Chicago."

"You're leaving?" the surprise and a certain measure of hurt was evident in Angel's voice as the questions tumbled from his lips. "Where are you going?"

"D.C.," she answered. "I haven't given the Jeffersonian a firm answer, but they want me. Badly. Very badly. And...it's an incredible offer, Angel." She stopped and then said, "But, I won't take it if...if I can't have you. I won't."

He angled his head to one side and gave her a long, wide-eyed look. "I've never wanted to hold you back," he said. "I want you to be happy. To be content, and to have an interesting life. I just—I just want to...to know somehow that what we have, today, and what we've had all these years, since the night we first came together here in Chicago, that we'll still have that, no matter what happens, or where either of us goes. Tell me that what's happened in the last three years hasn't changed that. Tell me that...well, if we can still be in each others' lives, as best and as often as we can, then...well, then I can be content with that. I could never be happy or content, Bren, if I knew that my happiness or contentment was at the expense of yours."

"It never has been," she said, the sincerity clear in her voice as she leaned forward to grab one of his hands.

She held his large hand between hers and looked into his eyes, which had softened and brightened in the wake of their slaked passion. As they held one another's gaze, she thought about all the times they'd been together in the eighty years since they first came together in the bedroom just a few feet away, and about all the times they'd parted company. She'd always tried to hold herself together, straight-backed and with a stiff upper lip, but Angel had never been able to hide the sadness he felt at being separated from her. His eyes—the warm, glimmering, welcoming, chocolate brown depths of his eyes—always betrayed his true feelings.

"It doesn't matter," she said, "if I stay here in Chicago or go to D.C or if you go to L.A. We'll...well, no matter what happens, we'll find a way to make things work. We always do...don't we? I mean...I-I...what do you want from me? If you don't want me, then..."

"I do want you, Bren," he said firmly, using her grasp on his hand to pull her towards him and into his lap. "I-I...I need you. I still want you...and we can still see each other, at least as often as we have, if not more often if we can, right? I'm done with...well, with her. And, I think you're pretty much done with the professor. So...us. Can we make this work, somehow? This thing that we have? Can we try? Please?"

Her brow furrowed in a mixture of temptation, want, and fear as she said, "Angel. It won't be easy—"

He placed his hand on her shoulder, stroking his thumb over the bony edge as he leaned in close, tilting his head as his lips hovered just inches from hers. "Bren," he whispered. "I know that. But, I need you." Hesitating but for another moment, Angel slowly moved in and pressed his lips against hers with a murmur, squeezing her shoulder in his hand as he felt her lips quiver against his. "I want you. I need you. So please...say we can try. That's all I'm asking for...just a chance. Please?"

He pulled away slightly and gazed into her eyes, rolling his lips together firmly as if he could hold onto the warmth of her lips for just a few more moments. Angel's warm brown eyes were moist with emotion as he gave her a pleading, wide-eyed look for a few torturously long seconds before he leaned in and brushed his lips against hers once more. He brought a hand up from to cup her face, his thumb stroking gently along the edge of her jaw as he whispered, "Please, Bren."

"Angel—" she whispered again, this time her voice more tender as she said his name. "I-I—"

He smothered her words with his kiss, pressing his tongue against the line between her lips with a desperate insistence, demanding admittance to her mouth. A small whimper sounded in her throat as her lips parted and she welcomed his kiss. His hand slid from her shoulder down her arm to the round curve of her hip, and he pulled her against him as his mouth worked against hers, his tongue seeking hers out as he savored the sweet taste of her mouth.

Sensing that she was running out of breath, he pulled away.

"Please, Bren," he moaned. "Please. Say yes. Tell me that we can try. I know things will happen, and it won't be easy with me in L.A. and you in D.C. We'll each have our own lives. But I need you to promise me that we'll find time for one another. That we'll be...we won't let go of what we have with one another. We came...this time, we came so damn close to losing it. And I can't...we can't let that happen. Never again."

Staring into his eyes, her own blue eyes bright as she looked at him, she nodded in agreement to everything he'd just said. "Okay."

Booth looked up from the cold steel floor and brought his eyes to meet Brennan's. He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple jerking in his throat as his mouth hung open in abject confusion. Rubbing his tear-rimmed eyes with the heels of his hand, he groaned and shook his head, then turned to her, his wide, warm brown eyes begging her to help him. His lips moved but he found himself unable to utter in that moment more than a single, simple plea:

"Bren..."

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-tbc-

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AN2: Okay, so there we have it. How was that for a crash course in Angel(us)-Booth's century and a half plus relationship with Bren? More importantly, what will Booth make of it? Who's ready to get going in some present action with Booth and Brennan? We know we definitely are so you probably are too. Please let us all know what you think. There isn't that much left to this piece after this point...just two shorter parts. Our goal is to have them (tentatively) posted this week in honor of Halloween. We'll see how we do. Until then, thanks for reading.