Future Infinitive

Author: Jo

Feedback: You bet! Tell me what you thought at thelibrarian2003@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: Usual stuff…

Distribution: The Angel Texts

Anyone else who has my stuff.

Rating: If you’re old enough to watch the shows, you can read this

Content: Angel/Buffy

Setting: Post NFA. A lot post.

Summary: What does the future hold for them both?

Written for the Angel Elders Mansion 2^nd RIP Anniversary, 2006.

And this story is for Dark Star. She knows why.

A story in the Declensions series.

Future Infinitive

Future Infinitive : A verb of expectation.

At http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2002-January/019995.html the following example is given of the use of this verb tense in Greek:

The future infinitive in the passage: ...YUCHN KARTWN hUPOMONHS EMPLHSQHSESQAI PROSDOKOUSAN... would allow the translation: "...a soul that expects it will enjoy its fill of the fruits of patience..." rather than "...a soul that expects to (imminently) enjoy its fill of the fruits of patience..." It's one of those subtle and beautiful nuances that Greek allows.

I couldn’t have given a better example myself, even though I’d almost finished writing the story before I read that. Spooky.

++++++

She’d just wanted to do a quick patrol before getting ready for the party. Her party. It was her birthday today, and she’d reached the ripe old age of 42, which was definitely something to celebrate for a Slayer. For the Slayer. The others were all gone now, and there’d been no more, although no one knew why. Perhaps there’d be another… after. But she was it, now, the one and only. So, she’d come down to Independence Park, where there had been some strange sightings, and she’d found the demon. She’d had no idea what variety it was, and she hadn’t really cared. It had looked as though standard slice and dice would finish the job, and that’s what she’d started to do.

Perhaps she wasn’t as quick or as agile as she used to be, and she seemed slower than ever today, but the demon still got the worst of it. The second demon, when it appeared, had given her quite a start, breathless as she’d been from the fight with the first one, but it hadn’t attacked, simply looked down at the ground, and then run off into the night. Nevertheless, when she, too, looked down, she understood why she was going to be late for her own party. Very late.

++++++

By the time they found her, the hot cider cup was cold, the canapés limp, and the little triangles of sandwich had curled into different dimensions. It was early the next morning, and everyone had been out all night, searching. They hadn’t thought of the park, though, and the task of finding her fell to a young red-haired woman with a blue backpack, jogging her way to work, ready for an early meeting at the office. She, too, was going to be late.

The police asked questions, as they always did, but the Medical Examiner determined the cause of death to be massive heart failure. He couldn’t have understood what a massive heart this woman had had, and certainly wouldn’t have known that if it were going to fail, it could only fail massively. Nevertheless, that was what he wrote on the death certificate.

The funeral was three days later.

++++++

She watched them gather around the sad little patch of land that was destined to hold her mortal remains, the bare and trampled earth around the hole tastefully covered for the service with artificial grass. There were more people than she’d expected, although not so many as there might have been, once upon a time. So many had been lost on the way.

The service was held in the morning, at 11 o’ clock. It was heavily overcast, and the sun hid itself away, refusing to do anything so inappropriate as shine on such a day of grief. Her husband led the mourners, trying to be strong for them all, but even his broad shoulders were inadequate to this task. As he came towards her, with his head bent a little in sorrow, she saw the grey hairs mingled with the dark. He, too, was getting older, and now he would have to do it alone.

Stephen. He’d loved her with all his heart, and she’d loved him as best she could, with whatever part of her heart she’d had left. That wasn’t always adequate to the task, either, although she’d never been unfaithful to him. She’d almost married another man, Anthony, but in a moment of inattention she’d found herself doodling their initials. B and A. She couldn’t have borne seeing that every day, and so she’d ended the relationship. They passed in the street occasionally, and he still hated her, because she’d never been able to give him a reason. How could he ever have understood? Or even believed?

So, she watched Stephen lead the mourners, their family and friends, although the family were mainly his, and the friends were mainly theirs. There was almost nothing of hers. There were no children, either, although they’d tried. That was probably for the best.

He wasn’t there, though, and she wondered if that was why she still was. If that was why she hadn’t gone to the remembered Heaven. Even as she thought about it, she knew that Heaven had been a lie. Her Heaven had only been Jasmine. How did she know that? What was happening to her? Why was she still Earthbound? If the place she had been had not been the Heaven she’d learned about as a little girl, was there a Heaven at all? Why had she got an afterlife if there was no place better than this to spend it? And if she had to stay, why was she in the cemetery, instead of other places she’d rather be? She knew that she should know the answer to all these questions – it was on the tip of her… Well, not tongue. She didn’t have one of those any more. Or anything much else, come to that, and yet she could still feel, and she could still think. In a way.

And then she knew that she had so much more to learn, to remember, to understand. If only she could find the right questions to ask herself. And if only she could survive long enough. She thought of Angel, and his presence filled her and steadied her, as if he were there with her.

++++++

He knew that she was gone. He saw her a few feet from him, looking exactly as she had done when he’d first loved her, exactly as she couldn’t look now, two and a half decades later. He didn’t just see her, he felt her, in that gut-wrenching ache he always got when she was near. He recognised the loss of her, somewhere deep inside, but there was also a feeling like a warm hand on his heart. Something within, some part of his soul, seemed to know that her flesh might be gone, but she still waited for him. That revelation almost killed him, because it brought him to his knees.

He was fighting a battle demon at the time, and he just managed to raise his axe and catch the scimitar aimed at his neck. When he’d killed it, she was gone from his sight, vanished as if she had never been there. But he knew. His task now was to find her.

Still, he’d been put at a disadvantage when he’d seen her, and the demon had been very strong. He went home as quickly as he could, which meant that he staggered there, rather than simply slumping down in the sewer for a few hours, waiting for the worst of the wounds to heal. When he’d safely locked the door behind him, he discarded the clothes he’d been wearing – there was nothing that could be rescued – and washed the blood off in the shower. He had no one to help him now, so he bandaged himself as best he could, and then he set about finding her.

He had deliberately not sought her out before now, because he really didn’t think he’d have the strength to leave her again if she’d been happy to see him. And because nothing had changed. He was still what he was, the happiness clause was still what it was, and the shanshu prophecy was still gone, signed away in a moment of hubris. He’d half thought that perhaps the Powers That Be would understand and take pity on him, but pity must be in short supply, and so he stayed what he was.

He had no idea where she lived, now, or what her life was like… what her life had been like… but he remembered something that he thought he’d dreamed once upon a time. There had been a beach, and sunlight.

‘If I was blind, I would see you.’

It was true. Even for other humans, he could find any one, if he really wanted. He’d hunted humans once, and he’d been very good at it. One of the best, really. He hadn’t done that in a long time, but the skill wasn’t lost. For a vampire, it was part of his flesh and blood and bone, even for a vampire with a soul. The soul made no difference to what he could do, only to what he would do. He could find any human he wanted, and she had shone like a beacon.

+++++

She had lost the notion of time, somehow, but she knew that he hadn’t taken long to come. In fact it had only taken him two weeks.

She had learned a few things in that time. For one, she’d learned how hard the waiting would be. Whenever the sun rose, it seemed as though it were trying to pull her apart. She’d no idea what she was made of now, or whether she was made of anything at all other than memories, but whatever it was, she had an overwhelming urge to spread herself on the sunlight each and every day. Moonlight was better. Moonlight was more manageable. But the urge never stopped. If she were to stay herself, it would only be by a constant effort of will. She thought that perhaps he might do better at that in the long term, that he’d already learned how to do it. Now, it was her turn, but it hurt. Every day, it hurt. Only he could give her the power to succeed. She wondered why that was.

Still, she needed a strategy. She’d seen the other ghosts in the graveyard, and each dawn they sank into the ground of what she assumed was their own grave, sheltering from the worst of the sun. It amused her to think that he had wanted her to have the sun and normal human things, and now it seemed that she’d finished up with something resembling the vampire condition after all. Learning from the others, she spread herself among the soil and roots and tiny denizens of the earth, sharing her shelter with those who were busy devouring her. Even here, she could feel the pull of the sun, but it was bearable. Just.

The night that he came to her, she saw him in the moonlight, his natural milieu, and she thought that he had never looked more beautiful to her. He was carrying flowers. She tried to reach out to him, to touch him, to put her hand to his cheek, but she had nothing to reach with, of course. Nevertheless, he paused on his path through the cemetery, and looked around. Then he brushed his own hand across his cheekbone, as if he had felt a moth’s wing, or perhaps the gossamer threads of a spider.

When he started to walk again, he made his way unerringly to her grave. She went with him.

The mound of soil had started to settle, but there was still only the temporary wooden cross instead of a headstone. He knelt by the cross, and placed the flowers onto the raw earth. They were red roses. She remembered other roses that his other self had sent, but that didn’t hurt any more. That had been simply part of life, part of the existence that had made her soul everything it had become.

And then she knew. Just like that, she knew. She was waiting for him. She wasn’t waiting for him to visit, nor to catch one last glimpse of him. She was waiting for the future. If she stayed here, then when the time was right, he would come to find her. They would have an afterlife together, if only she could be strong enough to resist the pull of each and every day, and the need to dissolve back into whatever had given birth to her. Her resolution grew. She would wait here, no matter how long it took. She was strong enough for that.

++++++

He knelt on the damp, cold ground, oblivious to the discomfort. Her scent was all around here, her scent, and something more, something that even as a vampire he was hard pressed to understand. It was as if the essential she were here, and for one dreadful moment of terror, a moment that made his demon shiver with anticipation, he thought that she might have been turned; that she might be here, watching, in cold flesh and blood. But sense prevailed. The earth had not been disturbed since the burial, and the grave still held its occupant. He was sure of it.

He was also sure that she was near, and that contradiction made him want to weep in relief. Perhaps true death might not be the end of all things. He laid the flowers onto the bare earth, and pressed his hands down, feeling the rain-sodden soil squeezing between his fingers. It had the same feel as the soil over his own grave, wet and cold and clammy. He tasted it in his throat once more, felt the weight of it when he had crashed his fist through the top of the coffin – a much flimsier affair in those days – felt mud slithering around his face and caking in his hair.

And then he did weep, giving way to the grief of a lifetime. He wept for Buffy, and he wept for his lost youth, and he wept for lost family and friends, and for one simple mistake centuries ago that had brought him so much sorrow. And he wept still even as he thought that that simple mistake had been the one act that had allowed him to know Buffy. Except for that, he would have died without meeting the only person who had ever shown him what true happiness could be, although the price had been terrible. He wondered whether there were an afterlife, not this obscene afterdeath that he endured, but a true afterlife where unfettered happiness might be possible. He prayed that it might be so.

He squeezed more of the wet clay soil through his fingers. Those hands had once held his lover close, caressed her silken skin, and pushed a humble silver ring onto her finger. Never again, unless there were an afterlife of some sort, and who knew what might happen then. He didn’t realise that he’d spoken his next thought aloud until he heard the words, unexpected on the dank night air.

“Where was my soul, for all those years? Before the gypsies called it, where was it? And where are you, now, my love?”

It was an important question, but there was no answer. He took the cellophane wrapper from around the stems of the roses, laying them carefully back down. He’d worried about the choice of flowers, because of what he’d once done, but they seemed to describe the Buffy/Angel relationship so well. Beautiful, but painful to touch. Then he took a handful of soil from the grave and carefully wrapped it in the cellophane. This was all that he would have to remember her by, but it would have to be enough. Her scent lay on it, and when he held it, his gut wrenched, a bitter-sweet ache, as though he were holding some part of her. He tucked the little packet carefully away.

When he left, he knew that he would be back, someday.

++++++

He came back regularly, although not for a long time. Her widower, Stephen, also came regularly for the first few months, but then only occasionally. Time meant little to her, except for the transitions from the harsh fires of the sun to the cold silver of the moon and sometimes, when the greater lights were gone, to just the enchanting sparkle of the stars, far out in the vastnesses of space.

Stephen came to her through the fire, of course, when she was sheltering, but she knew that he was there. She would try to reach out to him, to feel him, but she couldn’t, not in the way that she did with Angel. Angel came in the gentle mirror of moonlight, or simply by the light of the stars, and so the two men didn’t meet. Angel was the one she saw, and she was glad of that, even when he came to her in pain. Oh, she hurt, to see him in pain, but she believed that he left some of that pain behind, shed it onto the grass that now grew on her grave.

‘Be strong’, she would try to say to him. ‘I love you. I’m here for you, until you’re ready.’ And sometimes, she thought that he heard, with his much-despised heart, if not with his demon’s senses.

++++++

He kept the grave dirt in a small and beautiful grisaille enamel box from pre-revolutionary France. There was something about it, as if some tiny particle of her essence had been trapped there. He tried not to dwell on it, because his task was to get on with his life, not to revert to any version of the unlife he’d had before her. Similarly, he tried not to return to that small and undistinguished cemetery that held the mortal remains of so glorious a soul, but he couldn’t help himself. He was like a moth to a flame. He held out for five years, the first time. He only went then because his latest band of companions had fallen in a single night, in a trap laid by a powerful demon. He was responsible, and he had failed to keep them safe. He needed absolution, and he needed solace, and he needed to tell her about his pain.

As he walked through the simple wrought iron gate, it was as if he could feel her presence, even after all this time. Something deep within, something that he was sure no surgeon could ever find, seemed to be touched by her. He spent the whole night kneeling on the mown grass by her headstone, no flowers there but his own, and he found the comfort he needed.

++++++

Every day was hard for her. Every day, she felt as if she would fly apart, and cease to exist, but every day she fought it, and she waited. There were others here who waited, too, but very few who waited as long as she did. The souls, or ghosts, or however they thought of themselves, didn’t communicate in any way, rarely acknowledging the existence of the others. But they were all aware.

Sometimes, at first, new ones would arrive with the coming of hearses, but then the graveyard filled up, and fell out of use. Of the new arrivals, some would stay, and others would circle for a time, like a homing pigeon seeking its roost, and then they would leave, smoky spheres of luminescence that were apparently visible to none of the living. From time to time something like themselves would appear, arrowing over the surrounding landscape, and join with one of those who waited. Intermingled, they would leave, although she didn’t know where they went.

More often than she would like, one of those who waited would find the pull of light to be more than they could bear, and she saw them dissolve and vanish, silent cries of despair shimmering through the air around her. She never saw any of those reappear, and she was afraid for them, and for herself.

When Angel came, sometimes he smiled for her. He never seemed happy, not as she had seen him when their relationship was young, but when he smiled, he would talk to her, and tell her of some small triumph. She liked those times.

More often, though, he came in pain, and then he would sit silently by the side of her mouldering bones. Still, when she reached out to him, it seemed to help him, and he left stronger than he had arrived.

Occasionally, he was unkempt when he came, and stank of loneliness. His clothing would be ragged and soiled, with dirt ground into his skin, and a lost look in his eyes. He would never talk on these nights, and would curl up by her side. No matter how she reached out to him, she could never do enough, and it would be a long time before he returned to her.

Sometimes, he was badly injured when he came, and she could see that he had battled something terrible on the way. She longed to help him, but all she could do was try to give comfort to the essential Angel, the part of him that she waited for. She hoped that it was enough.

Twice, when he came, she saw defeat in his eyes, utter and complete defeat, and her soul bled for him. Yet, he drew strength from being close to her and when he left, he had a new light in his eyes.

Once, he was thin and gaunt and starved, his skin almost transparent under the faint light of the stars, for there was no moon that night. He knelt at her grave and cried all night. She didn’t know what had happened to him, but she cried with him, her soul bleeding tears of fire.

And once, after he had been absent for far longer than ever before, she saw that he was stooped and bent, his face skeletal, his eyes black and hollow, dead, dark pools of suffering that terrified her. He shuffled into the graveyard like an old, old man, slow and unsteady on his feet. When he fell to his knees and reached out to touch the ground she lay in, she could see that there was thick scar tissue around his neck and wrists. His movements were hesitant and pained, and although she couldn’t see, she knew that he carried many more scars than those. That time, he stayed until almost dawn, and she thought that he meant to stay beyond that, to finally lay down his life. Some dreadful part of her rejoiced at that thought. But, at the last moment, he hobbled away and found shelter somewhere. He came back for several nights, and when he did leave, it was a very long time before she saw him again.

++++++

Although she waited, that wasn’t all she did. She learned. It was as if knowledge were there for the taking, if only she could find the right way to grasp it. She reached out to find the truth behind the bonds that seemed to hold them unbreakably together, and that truth flooded through her, as though it were carried on the light. Perhaps it was.

She understood, in a moment of gestalt, that the Universe does not contain life. The Universe is life. She’d read, once upon a long time ago, that physicists could not understand why so much mass was missing when they weighed the Universe. Now, she could have told them. What they had failed to understand was the weight of life itself. The weight of the soul.

Energy and matter are the same thing, and a new soul is the purest energy, forged from the same cauldron as the stars. Souls are made all the time, energy wrought from the matter of creation. But souls, she suddenly knew, come in pieces, in parts. Like matter and anti-matter, there were two sides to each soul. They needed each other to be whole, to be real, to survive. So, if they needed each other, why did they come apart, at the moment they were created? That’s what she knew had happened, as surely as she knew anything that had happened in her life.

And once again, the answer was there for her, as if she could know every answer, if she could only frame the question. They needed to live. Life gave them a permanence they could not otherwise have. Life, experience, emotions. Hate. Grief. Love. All of these things helped to forge the soul into something it had not been: into an entity, into an awareness that could survive the ages. Or half an awareness, to be exact, because those two halves of the soul were still bonded to each other. And so the first one to be released from life waited for the other.

Now she knew where his soul had been after his death to Darla, where it had been before the gypsies forced it to come to heel. His grave had been empty, but that was where he should have waited for her, where she would have found him, had things been different. Instead, he had been forced to follow his corpse, trailing behind like wisps of breath on a frosty morning. There had been no aether for him. Yet he had still waited for her, even though she had not yet been born.

She understood now how hard that must have been for him. Those centuries must have given his soul a strength he’d never had in his younger life. She could feel the pull herself, the wrench of forces that threatened to tear her apart. It was this that threatened the weak, the new, the unseasoned souls. Or those souls whose partners hadn’t been able to wait, for whom there would never be that joyful reunion, that fusion back into an eternal whole. The first one to die must wait for the other, or there was no afterwards, no eternity. There was only extinction of being.

That was what tugged at her now, a little stronger each day. It was the urge to spread herself on the sunlight, to allow her energies to be subsumed by the solar wind, to feel herself fly apart and return to the cosmic furnace that had created her. An entropy of the soul, a nothingness from which she could never again be created. Alone, he had resisted; so could she. She would wait here, the lost one, waiting for the seeker to find her, for as long as necessary. She pictured his face, and held it before her, to give herself strength.

++++++

When next he came, he looked as beautiful as ever, but there was a hollowness to him, an emptiness that spoke of final despair. She looked at him and she simply knew that he had reached his limits. Enough was enough. He needed to join her, to join with her, in that eternal state of being where space and time are simply thoughts.

Perhaps it could have ended no other way. Perhaps he was always fated to choose when he had finished his journey here. Joy swept through her, and she wondered if he could feel it, too: whether her love and ecstasy would make his final ending a happy one.

As he always did, he knelt down by her side, and pressed his palms flat to her earth, as if it spoke to him. She wrapped her essence around him, trying to feel that beloved body for one last time, but her senses were different now. She needed his soul, not his flesh.

There was no moon that night, simply the tiny cold fires of the stars and, in that patterned darkness, he lay down in the shallow depression that now marked her grave and quietly waited for sunrise. She spread herself over and around him, and waited with him.

As a band of red-gold blazed onto the eastern horizon, she had a sudden fearful thought that this was wrong, that his soul would never survive the explosion of light that it would suffer at the moment of death, but then she remembered his strength, and how he had waited centuries for her. His soul would not have forgotten. And then there was a flash of heat beneath her and she was surrounded, encompassed, enveloped in the fires of a passion that could never stale or wither or die. She reached out to him, as he did to her, and the mere touch of the tiniest part of them was bliss. They reached further, ready to join in their eternal union… And then he was gone, snatched cruelly away. Her scream of rage and loss echoed through the cosmos, yet remained unheard on Earth by all except the ghosts.

++++++

It was night again, and he stood by her grave, leaning heavily on the headstone. He was confused and disoriented, and his skin still burned from exposure to the sun. There was something else – a touch, a fading memory, like the ending of a kiss. It had seemed to him for a few brief moments that, even though he’d never found forgiveness in life, he’d found it in death. Some secret part of him thought that he’d found her in death, as it had always hoped he would. He’d tried to stamp that part of him out, as everything else had been stamped out by his centuries of penance, but it had stayed with him, and that was why he’d chosen to end it here, with her.

The burn on his skin told him that he’d done that, and he was almost sure that there had been joy, and possibly rapture, the very transport of his soul in a true Rapture, perhaps, and then he was back here. He was very sure that this wasn’t Heaven, and so he wondered grimly whether it was Hell. That fear grew when he saw the figure walking towards him out of the darkness.

Holland Manners.

He hadn’t seen Holland since his last abortive attempt at a grand suicidal ending, trying to find the Home Office of the Senior Partners, and finding it here on Earth. Holland had been dead then, from Darla’s bite, and he was no different now. He came to stand next to Angel, shaking his head, a genial smile on his face.

“Angel, what are we going to do with you, hm? Trying to end it all… You should know by now it doesn’t work that way.”

“Get away from me, Holland. You may be dead already, but that won’t stop me killing you again.”

His voice was expressionless, and should have been all the more chilling for that, but it had no effect on Holland.

“I’m shocked.”

He looked anything but.

“I’m here to help you Angel, to stop you doing such pointless things. What were you thinking of, trying to make an end of it?’

Angel sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“That’s the point. It will be the end. I think I told you that once before.”

“You know you did, and you know how well that all finished up.”

They both stood in silence for a while. It seemed to Angel that a warm breeze fingered his face, filled with the sounds and scents of spring, but nothing else stirred around him.

“You never understood, did you, Angel? You never knew your place in the scheme of things? I guess I’ll have to tell you, then. Why don’t we sit down over here, Champion?”

He pointed to a small pile of discarded masonry nearby, and sat down on a block of grey granite. Angel moved over towards him, but remained standing.

“Don’t call me Champion.”

“Why not? It’s what you are. It’s what you will be.”

“My time on that is done, Holland. It’s over.”

Holland smiled in what he hoped was a kindly fashion.

“You think so now, but you’re wrong, Angel. Very wrong.”

“Free will, Holland. It’s all about free will. I’m exercising mine.”

Holland coughed discreetly.

“I’m afraid not, Angel. That’s what I’ve come to tell you about.”

Angel thought he’d worn out every emotion that it was possible to have, but as Holland talked, he found that he still had a small spark of anger, and that anger grew, until it turned into something else.

++++++

Buffy strove to understand what was happening. They had been so near to final union. Moments away. A heartbeat longer, and they would have been inseparably one. Then she saw the dead man, a solid thing among the crowd of ghosts. He spoke to Angel, and she tried to wrap herself around her lover, to soothe and comfort him as he walked a little way away from her grave to stand over the seated figure. She listened to what the man said, trying to sift his truth from lies.

“You were offered the chance of being a Champion, Angel, and you took it. Champions always have to make sacrifices, you know.”

“I’ve made my sacrifices. I’ve given everything.”

Almost, Holland thought, but he didn’t say it.

“Besides, why are you interested in Champions for the Powers That Be?”

Angel wasn’t sure whether he still worked for the Powers That Be. He’d seen and heard nothing from them in a very long time, but he had to think that he did, or he would run mad.

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Champions are as Champions do. I never quite understood that aphorism, did you? Something is as something does? In my experience, is and does are rarely the same.”

Angel remained silent, towering over his tormentor. Holland refused to be hurried.

“Do you remember the prophecy, Angel?”

“Which one?”

“I’m sorry, yes, of course, you’ve featured in quite a few in your time. I mean the one about the Apocalypse. You know the one – where you would play a pivotal role, and no one would know which side you’d be on?”

“There have been a lot of Apocalypses. I should think that particular prophecy’s played out by now.”

“There’s the thing, Angel. You’ve had a lot of big battles, but what do you think the Apocalypse actually is? I’m sure you were taught it as a child.”

Buffy thought that Angel wasn’t going to answer, as Holland waited expectantly, but eventually he did.

“It’s the final battle between Good and Evil.”

Holland beamed in approval.

“Exactly, Angel. The final battle.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, we thought you were always rather slow at this sort of thing. Not that you couldn’t be quick, mind you. Personally, I always thought you were slow because you didn’t want to accept the truth, not because you couldn’t see it. You wanted to believe the best. Stubborn, I told them all. He’s stubborn, not slow. I’m right, aren’t I? Tell me I’m right.”

Angel remained stonily silent.

“Oh, well, that bet stays in play, then. Look, Angel, if you are a key figure in the Apocalypse, you have to be around for the Apocalypse, now don’t you? All of these other battles, well, they aren’t our Apocalypse. They’re just battles that have to be fought to stop interlopers from getting in the way. Take Jasmine, for example. A lot of people thought she was pretty Apocalyptic, but all you did there was to save the Earth from her so that the Apocalypse could, you know, happen. Eventually. How can it happen if some outsider has taken over the world? Or some stupid demon has opened up the dimensions?”

Angel clenched his fists in anger.

“I didn’t fight those battles to save the world for you and Wolfram and Hart! Nor did Buffy.”

The man called Holland looked down for a moment, and then it seemed to Buffy that he took a sly sideways glance, directly at her. The smile on his face was more threatening than anything she’d seen on the face of Angelus, and a cold shiver went through her. The other ghosts were clustering nearer, listening. This cemetery was old and largely abandoned, and the ghosts were few now, but there were still some here, still waiting. Like her.

Holland looked back up at Angel.

“Yes. You did fight them for us.”

“You aren’t the Powers That Be!”

Angel almost shouted that, in response to the fear that had lanced through him. For once, his face gave his thoughts away. Could it be true that he’d only ever served the purposes of evil?

Holland laughed.

“Not me, no, certainly not. But have you ever thought just what the Powers might actually Be?”

Angel couldn’t answer. Holland tutted a little.

“Let me give you a clue. Good. Evil. It’s all a balance, you know. They’re all Powers.”

Buffy watched Angel turn away in disbelief, but she knew that Holland was telling the truth. It was all a balance.

“The truth is, Angel, we’ve come to an agreement. Well, we did that quite some time ago, right at the start of your affecting little story. Once you agreed to be a Champion, we could all see that you would be a good one. You might have noticed that Champions aren’t what they used to be. There simply aren’t many coming forward any more, and none of them are as good, or as durable, as you. And there was always that pesky little prophecy.

“You always wondered why you were released from Hell, Angel. You wanted to know what your purpose was. It wasn’t a release. Let’s just say it was a change of location. This is your Hell. I thought I’d already shown you that, but it seemed the message didn’t quite get across. Both sides have appointed you as their Eternal Champion, you see, here to save the world from destruction for as long as it takes us to get to the real Apocalypse. You’re saving it for all of us. You aren’t allowed to put an end to yourself.”

Angel spun round and grabbed him by the throat.

“You’re lying!”

Iron fingers around his throat couldn’t stop Holland from replying.

“No. I’m not. And you know it.”

Despite Angel’s grip, the man shifted his head a little, and it seemed to Buffy that he was looking directly at her again. And he was right. It was the truth. Angel let him go and stood silently, his clenched fists the only sign of his fury and his despair.

“The Apocalypse will be a very long time coming, Angel, and you won’t be released until then. But of course, when it does come, it will be the end of all things. Final battles usually are. Final, I mean. Everything will be gone, and I don’t just mean here.”

He raised his hand and swept it across the vista of the stars.

“Everything. Including you and me. That is what will be the end. Nothing will survive. So, it’s a pretty eternal stay in Hell for you, wouldn’t you say? There will never be another afterlife for you, because you will be gone. You can’t kill yourself. We’ll bring you back every time. They will, or we will, doesn’t matter. You’ll be brought back. Always and forever.

“We know you’re a bit, well, down just now, but we know that won’t stop you from doing your job. You’ll just go on as you always have, doing what has to be done. No peace for the wicked, you might say. You’re going to be fighting our battles for a very, very long time. Future infinitive, you might say.”

He seemed to look at Buffy again, and she felt another scream rising through her. Instead of an infinite future together, they would have an infinite future apart, until the world ended. It was all true, and there was no way out. She beat against them both, seeking… what she was seeking she didn’t know. Mercy, perhaps. Pity. Justice, even. Holland simply smiled. Unknowing, Angel walked away from him, back to the grave. He sank to his knees, his back bowed and his face set in a rictus of agony.

++++++

Holland stood up and walked over to the stricken vampire. It was his turn to be the one standing over. The contemptuous sneer on his face said it all. The vampire was at last on his knees, where he belonged. He was broken in a way that they’d failed to break him before. He was utterly and completely defeated. He would respond to their hand on the bridle now. And the woman was almost broken, too. Just one more little push.

He looked up to where the spirit hovered, and then down again at Angel. He’d never considered himself to be a cruel man – he’d loved his wife, and he’d given money to save kittens and puppies – and so he told Angel the last of the truth, as some sort of comforting explanation.

“You know, this sort of deal is very, very rare. You might almost say that it’s a one off in your case. So, the other Powers insisted on an escape clause.”

He saw the vampire shudder and the hovering soul pulse with hope.

“You triggered it by accident, when the Mohra turned you human, and because you gave that up so nobly, to save the Slayer for a few more months, and because it had been accidental, they came up with the shanshu prophecy. If you could achieve what was set out for you there, you would be human again, and you’d be no more use as a Champion, not for the sort of things we’ll need you to do. You’d be free, and we’d have had to find someone else. But you got under our skin, and so we took that away from you. Do you remember, Angel? You signed it away for a moment of hubris, a chance to have a pop at us, with no real hope of achieving anything except scratching your itch a bit. You remember that? The shanshu prophecy was your only hope of ever ending this, but it’s gone now. I can assure you, it’s never coming back. I suggest you make the most of what you’ve got. Eternity.”

Angel wrapped his arms around his stomach and curled into a tighter ball, on his knees. The roar of agony forced its way out of him, echoing up to the heavens, and it seemed to him that it carried away with it everything that wasn’t pain and despair.

++++++

Buffy’s soul reeled from the truth that fell from Holland’s lips with the absoluteness of death. A memory seared through her like the killing power of the sun, of the day that Angel had been human, and then given back. And shanshu… she hadn’t known about that, but she knew about it now. She knew that it was lost and gone. There could never be any future for them. Never. She was dead to Angel, and he was dead to her. They would each remain incomplete until the end of time.

She heard the anguish and hopelessness in his roar, and it was mirrored by her own silent scream. That was when she felt herself start to unravel, the bonds that her own life had forged melting away in the face of Holland’s truths. There was nothing to wait for, no future in all the aeons that were to come, and she simply couldn’t hold herself together any longer.

With a fleeting thought of regret and farewell, she let her energies be carried away on the sound of his pain. Instead of joining with the solar wind, to be carried across the furnaces of creation in the cosmos, she spread herself on the niggardly light of the stars, to be scattered through the absolute cold and darkness of the cosmic void. And then she was gone.

++++++

Afterwards, the old souls of the cemetery circled in sorrow at the place where a soul had died. She had been there longer than any of them, except one, and they were troubled at her ending, and by the manner of it.

The oldest soul, the one who had been there the longest of all, marvelled at the memory of those two. As they had tried to come together, those souls had blazed brighter than the fires of the sun. Who knew what they would have been like if they had achieved union? He wondered whether they could have been the ones foretold from long ago, the two who would be strong enough to outlast the end of time and the Final Battle, who could gather together the remnant souls of the dying Universe, and keep them safe until a new cosmos was born.

He shivered a little. If they had been the ones, it was too late now. She could never be recreated, and he would waste away without her, leaving a hollow shell behind. If these had been the two, there was no hope for any of them.

++++++

Holland Manners smiled up at the space where she’d been. Anything that had been Buffy Summers was gone forever. What was left of Angel would be their tool for the rest of time. The Senior Partners had been right. His work here was done. He went off with rather more of a spring to his step, leaving Angel curled up on the ground, truly alone for the first time, in a way that the vampire would soon come to understand. If he was still there at sunrise, they’d just keep bringing him back until he got the message. Forever, that was the whole point, right?

The End

May 2006

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