More Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk as evil hardcore vampires! Yaaay!

"The first bracket has been completed," said Quentin. "We shall now proceed with the second." He gave the signal, two gates were opened, and Demetri and Erebus walked through them.

The reaction of the crowd was much different than it had been at any point during the first bracket. They knew a little bit more about how the surviving vampires fought, and they had begun to pick favorites. It was, however, a difficult choice. The arena still smelled faintly of burnt flesh from when Demetri had held Arawn against the crosses for nearly half a minute, but there was also a shining pool of blood in front of the gate to Livius's cage, which served as a reminder of what Erebus had done to him. Ultimately, they seemed to take the side of Demetri, because his earlier strategy, while horribly sadistic, had been nowhere near as gruesome as Erebus's.

Everyone on the benches held their breath, waiting apprehensively for a repeat of the third fight, and even though his current opponent was far older and more skilled at fighting than the bloody heap of dust had been a few minutes before, Erebus obviously intended for exactly that to happen. He sprang towards Demetri with all the ferocity he had displayed against Livius, but Demetri was ready for him. When Erebus was little over an arm's length away and still mid-leap, Demetri caught hold of one of his outstretched arms and spun, flinging Erebus against the wall. There was a hiss as his skin touched the crosses and a loud crack as two or three of his ribs broke on impact, and he crumpled to the ground.

Smirking, Demetri kicked the spike Lyle had dropped up into his hand and walked to his fallen opponent, but Erebus's fingers had closed around the crossbow bolt that had killed Arawn, and he stabbed it fiercely into Demetri's right calf. Demetri yelled in pain and stumbled back awkwardly, trying to put less weight on the injured leg. Erebus jumped to his feet again, wincing slightly when the movement jarred his broken ribs, and moved towards Demetri, who had bent down to rip the crossbow bolt out of his leg. He left it there when he saw Erebus coming and swiped viciously at him with the wooden spike instead, leaving a deep, bloody gash across Erebus's stomach. Roaring in anger and pain, Erebus seized Demetri by his short hair and smashed his face into the ground, knocking him unconscious. He then grabbed him by the arm and threw his limp body with all his strength.

Quite a few people in benches directly in front of Erebus screamed and made to get out of the way. A second later, however, they realized that this was unnecessary, for Demetri was prevented from landing among them by the spikes protruding from the top of the pit, on two of which he had been impaled. Wesley watched Erebus return to his cage as Demetri exploded into dust, and felt his apprehension grow. He couldn't see how Angelus would be able to defeat that monster—assuming he even got past Sophia, the oldest vampire of the bunch.

[o]

When her cage door opened for the second time, Sophia didn't even look at Angel, but walked slowly over to the pile of ashes that had been Demetri moments before, bent down, and took a handful of them, letting the gray dust sift through her fingers to fall back to the floor. Angel watched her, but made no move to attack. Something was tugging at the back of his mind, but he didn't have time to think about it right now.

"It's strange," said Sophia, a hint of ironic laughter in her voice. "We were together for three hundred years. You'd think I'd care more, wouldn't you? Oh well." She stood again and looked over at Erebus, who stared back at her through his portcullis with dead, hollow eyes, his lip curled in a snarl, and anger flashed briefly through her expression. "If I couldn't be the one to kill him, I'll have to settle for being the one to avenge him."

She turned to face Angel, who was still watching patiently. "Well, what are you waiting for? Aren't you going to rush me like this hot-headed imbecile did?" she asked, gliding over to tap her foot scornfully on Ambrose's ashes. "It worked so well for you against the cowboy."

Angel shrugged, not taking his eyes off her. "Let's just say that I learned a long time ago never to underestimate a beautiful woman."

"Why, Angelus," she said, smiling coyly, "if we weren't here to fight to the death, I'd think you were trying to flatter me. Not that I'd mind." She let her gaze travel appreciatively across the well-defined muscles of his chest and arms.

"Yeah, well. Like you said, we're here to fight to the death," said Angel curtly, moving a couple of steps closer to her.

"Pity," she said, her face changing to show her demon.

This time, the crowd's decision was much more obvious. They wanted Sophia, whose previous methods had been the quickest and cleanest, to win, and they were convinced that she would. They had good reason. Her arm shot out so quickly that Angel barely saw it, but he managed to sweep the blow aside with a block at the last instant.

Angel knew from watching her fight against Ambrose that Sophia was fast, but watching it was quite different from experiencing it. He barely had time to throw any punches himself, he was so busy blocking and dodging hers, and didn't even notice that he had been taking steps backward until he touched the wall and pain seared all across his back. By reflex, he jerked forward and saw, to his great alarm, that her little sentimental moment with Demetri's ashes had been a ruse. Her real goal had been to retrieve the crossbow bolt from among them. She was now pointing the narrow strip of wood directly at his heart, the same smirk she had worn upon defeating Ambrose now stretching her lips.

Before the bolt made contact, however, Angel managed to redirect his unbalanced movement so that her aim went wide and it pierced his left bicep instead. Though this may once have slowed him down enough for her to renew her attack, his tolerance for pain was quite a bit higher than it had been the last time he was in as intense of a fight—which had been his swordfight against Buffy—, and he immediately backfisted Sophia across the face, tore the crossbow bolt out of his arm, and plunged it into her chest.

Sophia staggered against him, her face reverting to its beautiful human disguise. The emotional reaction to Demetri's death that had barely been there before was now obvious in every feature. She seized Angel by the shoulders and looked directly into his eyes with her pain and anger-filled ones. "You kill that bastard," she begged him fiercely, before finally crumbling into dust.

Wesley unclenched his hands from the edge of his bench with some difficulty. Just one more to go—and, happy coincidence, Angelus was not only holding his own; he was speaking again and using calculated strategy against his opponents, so it appeared as though his sentience and sanity had returned after all. His chances of getting to have that conversation with him were improving all the time.

[o]

Angel remained where he was, his eyes fixed on the portcullis across the pit that separated him from Erebus.

"The second bracket has been completed," said Quentin. "Let the final round begin." The portcullis opened, and Erebus emerged. There was no question now which one the crowd preferred. They wanted Angelus to win, but weren't sure he could pull it off; Erebus seemed remarkably mobile, considering the ugly bruising on his ribs and the deep slash across his stomach.

They circled, each sizing the other up and mentally dissecting the previous fights in search of patterns and weaknesses. Erebus moved in first, but Angel dodged the blow and then they were locked in close combat. Angel threw endless punches and kicks, while, apart from fending off as many of these attacks as he could, Erebus focused on getting Angel into some kind of hold from which worse damage could be dealt. A sharp elbow jab to Erebus's broken ribs gave Angel the upper hand, but he didn't keep it for long. Erebus chopped hard at Angel's injured bicep, then dropped and seized him about the knees.

When he realized what Erebus was about to do, Angel pushed off from the ground just hard enough to propel him higher and farther than Erebus had intended to throw him. He did a backflip in midair, missed the wooden spikes by inches, and landed on his feet in the space between the first bench and the short wall on the audience's side of the pit. Expecting him to be skewered on the spikes like Demetri had been, the crowd hadn't reacted at first, but now that a centuries-old vampire was on the wrong side of the barriers, pandemonium broke out.

Wesley was one of very few who remained in his seat, his eyes darting anxiously to each of the men with crossbows. He was sure they would shoot Angelus at any moment and spoil any chance he would have had to ever speak with him, but they didn't seem to be able to take aim thanks to the bedlam erupting around them.

With a roar of frustration that his enemy had thwarted what should have been the coup de grâce, Erebus took a running leap towards the wall, twisting to slip between the spikes at the top, and hoisted himself across. Angel swung a fist at him, but he ducked it and barreled into his chest, knocking him backwards into the bench and seizing him by the neck.

It took Erebus approximately a quarter of a second longer to notice that he was now amid a crowd of panicking humans—prey he had been denied for months. His hands immediately left Angel's throat and he raised his head to look directly into the face of a terrified Academy student on the second bench who seemed to have been too paralyzed by shock when the wrestling vampires crashed onto the bench in front of him to try to move out of the way. Everyone else was causing so much chaos in their haste to retreat that the four archers still couldn't get anything resembling a clear shot.

"It's been too long," said Erebus in a hoarse, rasping voice, his face splitting in a wide, evil grin. "Far too long." He lunged, and the boy screamed.

Realizing the other vampire's intentions, Angel sprang back into action. "NO!" he bellowed, leaping up, seizing Erebus around the middle, and hurling him back into the pit. With a loud smack, Erebus landed flat on his back on the stone ten feet below. Angel spun around and shot a brief assessing glance at the student, who had gone almost as pale as he was in fright but didn't appear to have been injured. Satisfied that the boy was okay, Angel then vaulted over the wall, ripping one of the spikes from the top on his way down. Erebus, still too dazed from when his head had hit the floor to even see it coming, failed to move out of the way in time to avoid the spike plunging straight towards his heart as Angel's feet hit the ground.

[o]

Wesley stared at the winner in shock, unable to believe what he'd just witnessed, which everyone else seemed to have been too busy panicking at the time to notice. Angelus, the Angelus, had just saved the life of a human being. Wesley had seen the expression of genuine concern on the vampire's face when he looked at the trembling boy before willingly leaping into the pit once more to finish off another of his kind. He didn't know what to make of it.

Nearly five minutes passed before the Council members and Academy students calmed down enough to realize that the tournament was over and—with the exception of a few people who had been trodden on when the crowd turned into a stampede—none of them had been injured.

"The winner of this year's tournament is Angelus," called Quentin in a slightly shaken voice. There was a smattering of applause—more in relief that Erebus had lost than anything, but Angel barely noticed. The thing that had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since the beginning of his fight with Sophia had become much more insistent now that his final opponent was dust at his feet. It was something important. Something about Buffy. She'd been in his dreams so often lately, always as the white, comforting light that had banished the lingering grasp of Hell from his mind. Those dreams were so real, so much stronger even than memory, that he was sure she was there with him somehow whenever he had them. After a hundred years of being denied even that much of her, these dreams were a gift he treasured deeply.

A hundred years. He had really been in Hell for a hundred years. Now, somehow, he was back, and all those years were beginning to feel like a nightmare, except that instead of waking up the next night, that enormous space of time had actually elapsed. Angel felt like he was being backed towards the edge of a cliff by his own train of thought, which was mercilessly forcing him to combine two simple facts. It had been a hundred years, and Buffy was mortal—which meant…which meant…. He couldn't complete the thought, but its impact closed around his heart like an icy fist all the same.

Angel felt like he was simultaneously reliving the time he had held Buffy's lifeless body in his arms and the moment of realization shortly after he had been cursed with his soul in Romania when it first occurred to him that everything he cared about—family, friends, home—was long gone. The only woman he had ever loved was dead, but there would be no Xander Harris to breathe her back to life this time, because he and everyone else from her life was gone too.

He had been wrong. His torment had not ended; it was just beginning.

I have been very careful to give Angel no reason whatsoever to believe that he isn't currently in the year 2098. Sure, there's a telling lack of technological advancement, but the only thing he's seen since regaining full sentience is the underground portion of the Council headquarters building, which already looks a few centuries out-of-date. And, for all he knows, the light that symbolizes Buffy in his dreams is really a Buffy who's in Heaven and finally able to visit him now that he's no longer in Hell. Anyway, lookie! The chapter title has a double-meaning! Which was actually a really cool accident. Also, good riddance to Erebus, and a very reluctant farewell to Demetri and Sophia. They were almost too much fun to kill off, even though I really had no choice in this situation.