Warning! Most of this chapter is an author note responding to a guest reviewer and hypothesizing. You can skip it you want, there is a little bit of story after the hash marks.

A/N Sphygmus, off the show Ford didn't go to a Suck House because the idea wasn't thought up until they needed Riley to cheat on Buffy.

In universe, that episode was an excuse for Buffy to know what staking someone she not only knew, but cared about, felt like, something Xander already knew from painful experience.

Ford is the episode where Buffy explains the reality of what vampires are to Ford and consequently, the audience. She tells him 'you die and a demon moves into your house and it walks and it talks and it remembers your life, but it's not you.'

And right after the Ford episode was the Dark Age with Eyghon and everyone saw for themselves that Angelus was still there, the soul didn't replace the demon, they were forced to occupy the body together.

That was season two when Joss was getting pressure to put Buffy and Angel together as a couple. Just before Halloween was the episode where Xander falls for Impata, the life sucking mummy girl and refuses to let her kill anyone, even if doing so means they can be together.

These warnings do no good, for either Buffy or the audience and Joss steps it up when five episodes later, the curse is broken, Angelus is loosed and Buffy let's him go, let's him kill. Which she has evidence of in the form of Theresa, staked by Xander and Ms. Calendar, found in Giles' bed.

Which means the soul went to Hell too when Buffy shut down Acathla at the end of season two and Willow succeeded in redoing the curse.

Beginning of season three there was the confrontation at her Welcome Home Party where Joyce and the others tried to explain to Buffy how her choices and actions caused people problems and hurt them, she responded by making fun of Xander and trying to deflect attention from herself. Which was followed Revelations were they learned Buffy had been hiding the return of Angel and playing with fire by kissing him. The group tried to do an intervention and explain how she was gambling with people's lives again and risking the curse like that and that they didn't like her hiding it all from them. And again she deflected and again it was at Xander.

I found a statement, unverified, online that Joss hoped he'd gotten rid of Angel as a character for good by sending him to Hell, but the fans wanted him back. Welcome Home and Revelations tried to show how bad an idea that was, of Buffy being involved with a vampire, especially one under a curse and the Ford episode the season before tried to get her and the audience to try to understand what the others were now reminding her of. Never once was the idea of cursing Ford brought up, because somehow both Buffy and the audience thought Angel was an exception to normal vampires. (Although in universe they didn't have the curse at the time.) But the curse was just a plot device to give the audience what they wanted. Joss has said that too.

If Xander was meant to be the audience's voice, as well as Joss's, than Joss thought they'd side with Xander on all of this and Angel 'the vampire with a soul' would no longer be a character on the show.

Unfortunately, the fans backlash over the Lie and demanding that Angel be brought back resulted in the opposite, Angel ended up with his own show. 😨

Boy, Joss wasn't getting too much of what he wanted, was he? 😗

That being said, Ford still knows vampires exist or did exist, in this story because he saw Buffy dealing with them in L.A. and he started his whole 'trade Buffy and clueless kids for immortality' before Xander as Dr. Strange cast that spell but I won't be doing the episode itself since once he finds no vampires in Sunnydale anymore he'll probably spend what little time he has left fruitlessly searching for some and not knowing they've been destroyed.

I understand being scared to die, but I don't like cowards who trade others lives for their own.

Sorry, this chapter ended up being one long author's note.

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"Hey, Cordy." Xander spotted the brunette cheerleader after class and remembering Ms. Calendar's request headed over to tell her about the extra class

"There should be a law against school on Saturday." She muttered. "But I don't want to fall behind either, so I guess I'll be there. So, Doofus, do you know what happened yesterday? Because I'm damn sure spiked candy didn't make me hallucinate a giant ugly blue thing trying to shred me, especially given that I didn't eat any candy."

Xander grinned and filled her in on the new state of the world and Angel's new state of being. Her response wasn't what he expected.

"Are you saying Buffy wasn't lying when she said Angel was a vampire?!" She hissed. "And now he's human?"

"Yep." Xander nodded. "Now he's a 26 year old human."

"He's ancient?! God, I thought he was in college, doesn't he know anyone over 25 is practically dead?!"

"Funny, considering he actually was a walking corpse yesterday."

"Gross."