Okay, I don't know why, but the website didn't bother to bump this story to the front page when I posted chapter nineteen. If you missed that chapter because of this inexplicable and highly irritating technical difficulty, just go back and read it before you read this one, otherwise things will be very confusing for you.
No, seriously. You need to read chapter nineteen first. Chronological order is important.
Angel didn't know what they were planning, but wasn't curious enough about it to wait around and find out. He could only hear one heart beating within the building now, and it was currently beating slowly enough that whomever it belonged to was surely asleep. His new shackles were suspiciously easy to break out of, even though, thanks to Wesley, he was strong enough that he could have broken free of the ones in his cell if he had tried. Rubbing the welts on his wrists, he made his way out of the dank basement. More suspiciously still, the door leading to the rest of the house hadn't even been locked.
As stealthy as he was, he couldn't stop the rotten floorboards from creaking very loudly at his every step, and he hadn't taken more than five of them when he heard that solitary heartbeat suddenly jump to a rate that was far more alert. Panicked, even. He moved faster, searching for an exit, but the place was like a maze.
[o]
Buffy slowly came to, her head throbbing dully. After a few more seconds, she remembered what had happened the night before. She'd been kidnapped from her own bedroom and shot with a tranquilizer dart before she could attempt to fight—not that it was very likely that she could have done something against those two men in her weakened state. Giles…how could he? No. She didn't want to think about that right now.
She opened her eyes and sat up, then felt a surge of dread. It was like waking up in a horror film. She didn't recognize her surroundings at all, and she still felt hopelessly weak. The walls of the small room had great chunks of plaster missing, so that the boards underneath were visible. The couch she was sitting on had been ripped in places, with stuffing oozing from the holes, and there was so much dust that she could taste it on the air.
Buffy might have been robbed of her strength, but not all of her Slayer abilities had been disabled. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she could hear the unmistakable sound of floorboards creaking beneath footsteps. There was a vampire nearby. Giles's words came back to her, and the creeping dread in her stomach expanded. "The Slayer is disabled and then entrapped with a vampire foe, whom she must defeat in order to pass the test." How was she supposed to defeat anything in this state? She had no weapons and no strength. Whoever had taken the matter of this test out of Giles's hands had placed her in a deathtrap. Her only hope was to escape before the vampire found her. She got to her feet and hurried to the door.
[o]
Angel could now hear light footsteps echoing from a nearby room, then the hinges of a door squeaking as it was opened. He had to hurry. Whoever was here with him—even though the idea that just one human could stop him from getting out was laughable—could easily call for backup if he didn't escape before they found him.
The next hallway he turned down apparently had better flooring, for the creaking stopped. He increased his pace even more, but he could still hear that heartbeat getting closer to him. But then he let out a great unneeded lungful of air in a sigh of relief. The door. It was large and very solid and sturdy looking, but that didn't discourage him. His first attempt yielded nothing but the sound of wood beginning to splinter. He tried again, wrenching at the door with all of his strength. This time, it gave.
His triumph was immediately doused by the flood of sunlight that streamed into the foyer and across his bare torso. With a roar of pain, he threw himself sideways into the shadows. How had he not known it was day? Had his acute ability to discern night from day without external clues atrophied during the century he'd been trapped in an eternally sunless hell? Now the absence of his jailors made sense. They hadn't left him unguarded in this place; they'd simply given the day shift to the sun.
[o]
Buffy froze. From the moment the creaking stopped to a second ago when that agonized shout had reverberated through the corridor, she had thought she'd been putting more distance between herself and the vampire. But that wasn't what had robbed her of her motor functions. That voice…it couldn't be. Her breath caught in her lungs. Was it the First again? No…the First was incorporeal; it couldn't have made the floorboards creak—nor could it have tripped her built-in vampire radar.
Without pausing to consider the possibility that she might be wrong—no, that she was definitely wrong, because Angel was in Hell—, she began to run in the direction from which the shout had come.
[o]
When the footsteps pursuing him broke into a run, Angel dove into the room off the entrance hall. He had two options. He could either incapacitate his pursuer, or he could find a place to hide. The latter idea repulsed him—he'd spent too much time hiding already—, and the former could potentially prevent backup from being called until later. But he still hadn't moved towards carrying out either course when the footsteps came to an abrupt halt—right behind him.
[o]
Shielding her eyes against the brightness of the sunlight streaming into the hall and ignoring the freedom offered by the open door, Buffy stopped and turned slowly to the left. Her heart gave such a painful wrench of longing that it almost caused her to cry out. It was really him. Ten feet away from her, with his back facing her, every muscle in his body coiled and tense. She would have known it was him even if the telltale tattoo on his shoulder blade hadn't been plainly visible.
[o]
"A-Angel?" came a choked voice from behind him. A voice that he recognized—the sound he would have given anything to hear again for the past hundred years. But it wasn't possible. He whipped around, his gaze instantly fixing on the figure standing there, dazzlingly illuminated by golden sunlight. He was sure that if his heart hadn't already been still, it would have stopped. Before he could process any further, the girl who looked, sounded, and smelled exactly like Buffy had dashed forward and thrown herself into his arms. "Oh, God, Angel. It's really you," she sobbed into his chest, her arms locked tightly around him.
"Buffy," he croaked, returning the embrace. Shock and joy wreaked havoc on his mind in equal measure. She was here. Buffy was here. But then he remembered where here was, and abruptly came to his senses.
This was a lie. Buffy was dead.
Blind fury rose in him. So this was what Cruciamentum meant. This was what the Council had had in store for him all along. To torture him with the one thing he wanted more than anything in the world but which he knew was already gone from him forever. They had certainly chosen their poison well, but he'd sooner go back to Hell than allow them to corrupt her by using her against him. With a snarl, he ripped the imposter off of him and slammed her against a crumbling wall, his true face to the fore, his hand closed around her throat, holding her at eye level with him.
[o]
In an instant, Buffy's most wished-for dream of eight months had become her most dreaded nightmare. Angelus. No, no, no… Staring into the livid golden eyes of the demon, she desperately tried to tug his fingers away from her throat, but the drugs were still at work in her system, and her efforts were in vain. How could the Council do this to her? How could they think she'd want to take orders from them if this was what they could put her through?
"What are you?" he snarled, his jaw clenched tightly and fangs bared. What? That question didn't make any sense. Angelus knew her. He knew her as well as Angel did. He had used that knowledge to torment her for four months, for God's sake!
"You already know," she wheezed, glaring back at him.
"NO!" he bellowed, his other fist smashing through the wall an inch away from her head. He looked almost insane with rage now. Buffy had never felt more terrified in her life. "You can't be her. She's dead," he spat.
"What?" she asked, confused and still frightened out of her wits. "I am Buffy, and I'm not dead!" She was starting to feel dizzy from the decreased flow of blood to her brain. She feebly tried to pry his hand away, but had no more success than before. "Let me go," she whimpered pleadingly.
"It's been a hundred years. Buffy is gone." She heard the slightest anguished tremor in his menacing tone, and then it all made sense. Well, most of it, at least. She remembered Ken's demon dimension, and how time moved much more quickly there. The same must have been true of the hell Angel had been in, and he thought that an equal amount of time had passed on Earth. She just had to convince him of the truth before the blackness now throbbing at the edges of her vision could engulf her. Redoubling her efforts to loosen his grip, she tried to arrange her features into a tender expression, but all she managed was a grimace—being throttled was really quite painful and not an easy thing to ignore.
"Hasn't…been a hundred…years," she said. It was becoming increasingly difficult to speak, but she gritted her resolve and enunciated as clearly as she could. "It's nineteen…ninety-nine. Time is different…here than in Hell. You've only…been gone eight…months." Eight months that had been two thirds of the hardest year of her life. He didn't release her, but his grip slackened and a flicker of uncertainty disrupted his furious expression. "Oh, Angel, I've missed you so much." Her voice broke, and tears streaked down her face to fall on the back of his hand. She reached out to touch his face. His anger, along with his vampiric features, melted away, and he lowered her slowly back to the ground.
"Buffy?" he asked. His deep brown eyes were locked searchingly on her gray-green ones and his tone was cautious, as though he didn't dare to hope, but his hand had finally left her throat and moved to caress her face instead.
"It's me, Angel," she said.
As if in slow motion, Angel sank to his knees. His arms moved to wrap tightly around her middle and his face pressed against her stomach. His joy that she was really here was almost as painful as his grief had been, and he wept just as hard at getting her back as he had when mourning her, her name falling from his lips again and again like a prayer.
I hope I didn't make anyone dizzy with all of the perspective changes. Anyway, Buffy and Angel are together again, and it only took me twenty chapters. I had their reunion figured out before I even started posting this story, and it is such an enormous relief to have finally reached it. I'll try to keep up the same frequency of updates from now on, but my muse is showing signs of losing interest now that I've gotten to this part. I'll see if I can't talk some sense into her, though--except that it's getting to the time when I really should be focusing on writing the next episode of "Season 9" instead.