"Does someone want to explain to me why we're at school on a Saturday? It's not natural," said Cordelia, looking as if she thought her surroundings might contaminate her. Willow gave a small, pouty frown that Oz found adorable. Faith swung her feet up onto the table and tilted her chair back on two legs with an air of complete indifference.
"No one said you had to come, Cordy," said Xander.
"Oh, please," she scoffed, "like I was going to miss it? If the world's ending, I can't just wait until a school day to be forewarned." She turned to Buffy and Giles, looking concerned. "The world's not ending, right?"
"No," said Buffy.
"Great. I guess that means I should probably get started on my history paper," she said dully.
"There was a history paper?" asked Xander, looking alarmed.
"Yeah," said Willow, sounding almost hurt. "On Bosnia. Don't you remember? I went over the material with you." Xander banged his head on the table and groaned.
"So, uh, what are we here for?" asked Oz.
"Two things," said Buffy, glad someone had brought the subject back to relevant ground. She looked at Giles as if asking for permission, and he nodded rather wearily. "Firstly, Giles was fired from being a Watcher."
"What?" squeaked Willow. "What do you mean, 'fired'? Like, fired fired? Let go? Unemployed? Between jobs?"
"Thank you," said Giles, which put a stop to Willow's increasingly horrified synonym-spouting.
"How did it happen?" asked Xander.
"Oh, apparently I'm a little less heartless than the Council requires," said Giles lightly, his expression glum.
"I'm writing an angry letter," said Willow, still deeply troubled.
"Does that mean you have to go back to England?" asked Cordelia.
"No, I'm staying," said Giles slightly indignantly. It would take more than that to make him leave his charge.
"Oh, good," said Willow, relieved.
"They gonna send a new Watcher?" asked Faith, sounding very apprehensive.
"Yeah," said Buffy.
"Joy," said Faith, scowling.
"Okay, so what's the second thing?" asked Xander.
Buffy fidgeted for a moment, looking nervous. Finally, she took a deep breath and got it over with. "Angel's back," she said. These words triggered a variety of reactions, all of which were negative. Cordelia looked panicked; Xander, shocked and angry; Faith, dangerous; Willow, anxious; and Oz…just looked like Oz. Perhaps the crease between his eyebrows had deepened slightly. It was hard to tell.
"Why didn't you tell us before now?" demanded Xander.
"Maybe because I didn't know until this morning, and then I had to wait for the evil narrow-minded Council guys to go away," said Buffy irritably. Xander opened his mouth to reply heatedly, but then her words sank in and he backed off, looking sheepish.
"Did he do that?" asked Oz, looking at Buffy's neck.
"He didn't think I was real at first," she said, starting to wish that she had just worn a scarf. "He was in Hell for a hundred years, so he thought I was dead and didn't like the idea of a fake me. I managed to convince him that it's just nineteen ninety-nine, though, so it's okay."
"D-does he have a soul?" asked Willow cautiously.
"Yes," said Buffy. "Your spell did the trick."
"So he's not evil," said Xander warily.
"No, he's not. In fact, if the Council had pulled their little stunt with any other vampire, I'd probably be dead by now."
"Oh," said Xander. He seemed to be fighting a fierce mental battle of some kind. Finally, he gave a jerky nod. "Well, okay then. As long as you two keep the smoochies in check." Buffy turned bright red.
"This another vamp we don't get to kill?" asked Faith.
"He's the only vamp we don't get to kill," corrected Buffy. "If Spike hadn't been holding Xander and Willow hostage, there would have been no reason to let him out alive."
"Great," said Faith, looking sour.
"So, everybody okay?" asked Buffy tentatively. Nobody said yes, but they didn't say no either. It was a start.
"Um," said Willow, "how is he back? Do you know?"
"No, I don't. He's been in the Watchers' Council's dungeon for months, though. That's what I kept seeing in my dreams."
"How come Giles didn't know that's where he was?" asked Cordelia, looking at the ex-Watcher suspiciously.
"I've never been to the dungeons at headquarters," said Giles. "Very few Watchers ever go down there, actually. And nobody over there saw fit to tell me that Angel had come back until they brought him along for Buffy's test." He walked away from the group in the direction of his office, muttering darkly about the nerve of the Council for not telling him straight off that Angel had returned.
"Someone's bitter," said Xander once he was out of earshot.
"He's not the only one," said Buffy, sighing and flopping down into an empty chair.
"Is that all?" asked Cordelia.
"Yep," said Buffy.
"And you're sure the world's not ending?"
"Yep." Without further ado, Cordelia departed. Faith and Xander followed not long after. Oz looked at Willow, silently asking if she wanted to do the same, but she was still looking at Buffy.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I told him I'd go see him tonight," said Buffy. "He's staying at his old apartment."
"A-are you two, you know, together?"
Buffy nodded. "There's some stuff we need to figure out, though. I mean, I guess that's obvious. But we don't want to be apart, now that we don't have to be."
"Makes sense," said Oz, reflecting inwardly that he wouldn't trade his second chance with Willow for anything, and thinking that it must be similar for Buffy and Angel. He could not, therefore, begrudge them their second chance, and nor, judging by the hopeful expression on her face, could Willow.
[o]
Wesley's breath puffed out in front of him in little clouds that sparkled in the moonlight, and he shivered, pulled his overcoat more tightly around him, switched his briefcase to his other hand, and continued his purposeful gait up the street. He had hoped it would be a bit warmer this much farther south than England, and perhaps a bit drier, but he had been disappointed on both counts. In fact, Romania seemed even colder than England, what with the snow all over the place.
If he was honest with himself, though, Wesley was amazed that he had come this close already. He had foolishly imagined spending weeks wandering the forested foothills of the Transylvanian Alps north of Bucharest, looking for caravans. Instead, he was in one of the poorer districts of the city itself. As he didn't speak Romanian, he couldn't be entirely sure the people in the city had been talking about this particular area of town, but he felt confident enough in his English to Romanian dictionary to keep walking.
After about an hour's aimless wandering, he decided to get his bearings again. Feeling distinctly awkward, he knocked on the first door of a row of houses that were joined together. A few seconds later, a petite, dark-haired, olive-skinned woman answered the door. With the help of his dictionary, he asked her in fragmented Romanian whether she knew anyone by the name of Kalderash. She looked closely at him for a moment, then nodded and beckoned for him to come inside. He followed her gratefully into the warm and cozy dwelling.
Once the door was closed, the woman promptly disappeared down the narrow entrance hall and around a corner. Wesley waited where she left him, feeling nervous. For lack of anything else to do with himself, he looked around, and, in doing so, noticed two long garlands of garlic hanging on either side of the door, and a cross above it. Though he had only been in Romania for a couple of days, these were not the first signs he had seen that indicated how much more aware of the malignant supernatural these people were than most of their Western European counterparts. It occurred to him then that there might also have been more significance to the woman's lack of verbal invitation than he had initially thought.
After about a minute, she reappeared with a tall, burly man who had the same coloring as her and whose jaw, chin, and upper lip were covered in a thick, short beard that suited his features well.
"We are Kalderash," he said brusquely, by way of an introduction. "What do you want?" His voice was deep and heavily accented, and in spite of how intimidating he was, Wesley was relieved to find someone who spoke English.
"My name is Wesley Wyndam-Pryce," he said. "I have traveled here from England." He hesitated, then decided to get straight to the point. "Does the name 'Angelus' mean anything to you?"
Unmistakable recognition flashed through both sets of dark eyes looking back at him. Neither the man nor the woman spoke, though the latter let out a small gasp. From his briefcase, Wesley pulled two books. The first was one of dozens detailing Angelus's many bloody acts during the latter half of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth centuries. The second was the book that referenced the vampire attack on the Kalderash and the punishment they meted out for it in eighteen ninety-eight.
Wesley held these books out, and the bearded man took them. He opened the first and began to skim through it. His dark eyes widened and his thick eyebrows contracted. He looked through the second one for an even shorter amount of time before closing it with a snap.
"How do you know of our people's history with that beast?" he demanded, advancing menacingly.
"I talked to him about it last month," said Wesley casually, standing his ground.
The man was so taken aback by this that he stopped closing in on him. "And you survived?" he asked, amazed. His expression became somber. "Then you were more fortunate than our cousins, Janna and Enyos." On hearing their names, his wife bowed her head and made the sign of the cross over her chest.
"I'm very sorry for your loss," said Wesley. "However, when I said that I'd met Angelus, I was not referring to the soulless monster who was a blight upon your ancestors. I have only ever encountered him with his soul intact."
"But if you spoke to him only last month, then that is impossible," said the man. "The curse was broken a year ago."
"Indeed it was," Wesley agreed. He looked shrewdly at both of them, and then at the garlands and cross around the door. "Have you perhaps been expecting him to come calling?" The man glared at Wesley in response, but Wesley rather thought he saw a flicker of fear behind his eyes. "Well, you needn't worry about that. The curse was performed again successfully four months later."
"This was not done by any of the Kalderash," said the man, who clearly did not believe Wesley. "Liliana," he indicated the petite woman beside him, "is the granddaughter of our wisest and most accomplished sorceress. She is the only one who could have hoped to perform the curse again."
"That may be," said Wesley, "but I assure you that it was done, with or without the help of your people. Angelus had me at his mercy every day for months, and yet here I stand, completely unharmed. You know better than most, I'm sure, that the odds on me surviving had he truly been the monster from those books at the time would have been impossibly long."
The man still looked skeptical, and Wesley lost some of his patience. "I tell you with complete certainty that he has his soul again!" he insisted loudly, but now he had reached the crucial point, and he would need to proceed both cautiously and politely if he wanted any good to come of this journey. He took several long, calming breaths before continuing. "I am here, sir, to ensure that he keeps it this time."
Okay, I would just like to say that I have never been to Romania, nor do I know anyone who has ever been there...except I think one of my classmates from when I was in high school, but I doubt he would want to give me details about it for the sake of me writing more accurate fanfiction. So, if I totally screwed that up, I apologize. I did my best with what google searching gave me. Anyway, now we know what Wesley went on research leave for. Bwahaha. The cookies for guessing that correctly go to Pylea and Ally. Also! The reactions of the Scoobies to the news that Angel is back. Unlike in canon, Buffy actually told them about it right away, it's been long enough since Angelus's brief reign of terror for them to move past it, and Xander is much more over his issues against Angel than he *ever* was in canon. Consequently, mellower reactions.