Let Me Alone

Notes: Set after 5.11, "Damage". Title and summary from Job, ch.7.

I couldn't take my eyes off them.
Angel's dreams have a nasty way of coming true.

Pictures in his mind's eye, hallucinations from Orpheus, calynthia, Selminth leeches and the order of Kun-Sun-Dai, pages and pages in his sketchbooks: A barrage of images, flood and typhoon, and they're all dreams, each and every one. Dreams and real, and there's no escape.

He might be going crazy, except he's lived like this for so long -- there's no line any longer, no distant point of lunacy towards which he's inexorably moving.

Angel leaves Spike in the infirmary. He's sleeping now, fitfully and fretfully as he ever did back in the day, grumbling under morphine and his intrinsic obnoxiousness.

Angel rides the elevator to the thirteenth floor.

The last door at the end of the hall has a neat brass plaque that reads "Dimensional Security, Surveillance, and Privacy Efforts". He's been coming here every day, several times a day, since last spring. Since just after Connor's blood began drying on his face, when his hands still shook from the memory of Buffy's smooth skin and hard muscles.

The chair here matches the one behind his desk upstairs; sometimes, he suspects they're the same chair and he's dreamed the elevator journey. Instead of the spacious office opening in front of him, however, there is a wall of television monitors, four rows of them, probably ten to a row. Sometimes more.

He can see anything from here.

Angel sits in the chair and waits for the pictures to come.

I'm cursed. My seeing things is an affront to the Lord.
All he's ever done is watch. Knowledge comes first through the eyes; to claim sight for himself is a sin worthy of Job, who hectored God, wailing thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.

He that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more, but Angel did rise, and he is more than unclean. He might as well watch. In front of the monitors, Angel dreams and sees. Wolfram and Hart security is the best, of course, their surveillance second to none, and he isn't surprised by that. Right here, eyes open and chest empty, this is where he belongs; someone smarter and younger can play at being in charge, Wes or Gunn. Just not Spike.

Angel will watch.

What's a Slayer? Young William asked once at the bottom of a mineshaft. Brash, indignant, ignorant of everything that Angel had always known. She was a baker's daughter in Lyons, the wife of a soy sauce distributor in Kyoto, an unmarried mother in Kiev. Tapestries and taproots, threads of power and destiny twining over the world.

In China, he tasted the Slayer's blood in Dru's mouth, from Spike's thigh: It was the same blood the Master kept bottled and sunk in a deep well on Saint-Louis island in Paris, uncorked to welcome adepts and to reward extraordinary effort. The girl on the savannah, writhing beneath rapacious black smoke: She tasted like the rest of them, though she looked different. They all looked different.

Under the surface, however, they all taste the same.

So Angel knew her, had tasted her long before her grandmother was born. He tasted her again, several times, before she saved him with her blood: Scrape of fang on her tongue in an empty ice rink, streaks of it on his finger one rainy night just before everything changed, surfeits and floods of it, choking but never killing him while he was in Hell.

He knew her. He watched and followed her, tracking her like any other prey but managing to convince himself that *he* was the rabbit thrashing in the net.

Desire, obsession, possession: These are what love meant and, for once, he was not at fault. He was a creature of his time, when love meant property, economy, household management.

He'd always known about her. There have always been wild girls who ride alone through brambles and moonlight, coax unicorns to doze in their laps, save kingdoms and legions with the force of their martial belief. They might be slayers, or martyrs, saints, witches, madwomen, but they'd always existed.

He watched her fight, watched her cry, from hedgerows and darkened cars, alleyways and rooftops. He followed the sinewy beauty of her form and the cloud of her golden hair, entered her bedroom for reasons both loving and cruel, kissed her lips and fucked her senseless, but he never managed to see her. *Know* her, speak to her.

So he watches still.

She is indescribably older, stronger, more graceful than ever these days. She has emerged from rounded, girlish beauty into someone, some form, he cannot fathom. Her jaw like a scimitar, her eyes pondwater dark but deeper than any sea he has plumbed, been sunk into, and he *watches*.

Pictures, memories, consequences, events and wishes: They're all dreams and they will not release him.

Cool! Is that high-def?
At her funeral, he watched Dawn cling to Tara, then Xander, then Spike. It was all about the blood; everything returns to blood, and she hugged him, thinking she knew him.

Spike growled, low in his throat, and Angel knew the warning immediately. Stay away, mine, don't even think of it, and Angel wanted to laugh.

That was the first time he understood what was wrong, and, as usual, the earth already turned, it was far too late. Not about a girl, her blood, and a woven, unbreaking line of fate and destiny.

He'd loved *her*. Not the nymphet, not the ancient blood in her veins, not the Slayer.

He loved her. As, earlier that year, he'd loved Darla; as, later, he would grow to love Cordy. The word was the same, but the women were different. *He* was different with each one. He loved her and, in loving, he lost.

He'd had a soul for over a century but it was only then and there, at her grave -- and now, always motherfucking over and over *now*, thanks to Spike and his own shrivelled heart -- that he knew what a soul might be. How it made you. Not a conscience, far more than guilt.

Take a long look, hero.
There's a phone on the counter in front of him. He doesn't know her number, but it doesn't matter. He picks up the receiver and the monitor directly in front of him flickers and ripples. William's blue morning coat darkens into Darla's agonized face and rainrunning dust, then brightens into syrupy golden light and a small, neat room. Early morning in LA, already late afternoon in Rome.

Buffy, in loose pants and a tight tank-top, stretching in the light from the tall window. Golden, tan, so many tones shimmering around her and over her that he blinks, brings a hand to shield his face before he realizes how foolish he's being.

"Rome?" he asks when she answers. At the sound of his voice, she wraps an arm around her waist and ducks her head, smiling. "What're you doing in *Rome*?"

"Anti-Sunnydale," she says. "Well, air's just as bad, but you know what I mean."

"Nice city," he says. He knows most of Europe by night, Riga to Seville, shadows and blank-eyed monuments. "Haven't been there in years."

"Dawn likes it," she says.

She is mother and sister both and the kindness has slipped easily over her original strength. The power is still there, everywhere, archery-taut in the muscles of her arms and the twist of her neck, somehow clearer than it ever was.

"But you don't?"

"Don't mind it," she says, crossing the room to lean against the windowsill. She swipes her hand over her face and shakes out her hair. "Dawn loves it. You know what they say -- You can compromise on a new suit, on the dream house, maybe, but never -"

"Never," he says, "never on the girl."

"Right."

Angel watches, the phone cold against his ear, and sees her scratch the base of her neck, her fingers seeking out the faded scar.

There are no longer any stories to tell about her, or so, he realizes, we're supposed to believe. She believed that about herself for a long time; he's watched her fly through dimensions and claw her way out of a grave. Watched her cut herself, convinced she was a corpse, and not believe the pain that crackled like fire over her face. And, later, arms wrapped around herself, she moved through empty streets, trying to be the fist she thought she ought to be. The only one, solitary and brutal.

Crowds of blondes on the monitors, ones whose names he never knew and those he knew all too well, PennWilliamDarlaConnorBuffy, and now legions of slayers the world over, even Dawn, of her but not her, but now, again, he sees her.

It's habit and instinct to group people and things, assemble rough categories and push the members together until all you see is the general similarity. Blonde, girl, boy, evil, good.

The monitors blink and glow at him, each one breaking down to pixels and pigment, until all that's left is Buffy.

One girl in all the world.

Buffy cracks her neck and says, "Didn't expect you to call."

"No? Thought I'd take what that little guy said at face value and just let it go?"

She smiles and glances out the window. "Girl can dream, can't she?"

"Suppose she can," Angel says and shifts in his seat. "When were you going to tell me about the spell?"

Buffy pushes off from the window and flips through a magazine on the table. "Had to be done."

"Tricky stuff, magic," he says, and for a moment hears Connor's sneer -- all of you and your *magic* -- before he clears his throat. "Messing with the world like that."

Buffy lifts her hair off the nape of her neck and flaps it; she must still be sweaty, trying to cool herself. "Like I said -"

"Had to be done," he says quietly. "I get that."

"Yeah."

He doesn't know what to say. If he could touch her, somehow, this would be easier. "You need anything?"

She's back against the window now, hair alight in a corona, her face shadowed. "I'm good."

"You don't -" Look like it. Have to lie to me. "You sure?"

She smiles then, a little, ghost of her old hopeful grin, and nods. Nods again, as if to convince herself. "Surer than sure."

"Okay." His face feels tight; he always feels too big, too brutal, around her. She said once she wanted to learn his grace, and he went along with that. Led her with huge hands and dead heart through simple katas, inhaled the scent of rosewater and sweat from her hair, and knew he would leave Sunnydale.

"What about you?" she says and he cannot make out her expression. Her voice is soft, the one she uses in his dreams, the ones where she wears a white dress and bares her throat and lets him drink, just before staking him. "Angel?"

"I -" He hates words. Hates language and memory and this fucking place with the monitors looming over him. "Need a favor. Want a -. Want a gift."

Buffy tilts back her head, smiling at the ceiling, her eyes narrowed. "Something plastic and Catholic? Could probably dig *something* up here," she says. "Souvenir, tortured souls and, like, droopy-dog God?"

"Want you to make me something." His eyes are closed now, but that's just a membrane. Just skin, glowing red in the monitor's light. Not nearly enough to keep him from watching.

"Try someone else," Buffy says. "I'm crafts-challenged. Wove a potholder once for Mom, and it came out shaped like a turtle. With a goiter."

He can turn the chair around, but the monitors rotate, too, and there's no escape. He squeezes his eyes shut until firecrackers burst purple and white over his vision. "You can do this."

"I could beat something up for you," she says. "I'm really good at that."

Teenybopper in a graveyard, missing the heart; fierce girl in the alleyway, kicking him before accepting the crucifix; sad lover in the ruined garden learning a new kata. Sinewy, beautiful woman slicing up that preacher and smiling at him like an equal. "You are."

"There's a Tangelo mage living under St. Peter's."

"He conjures hybrid fruit?"

"No, he -. Right," she says. "Tanqueray? Tantalus? Something. He's harmless, though. Don't think I could beat him up. He helps Dawn with her Etruscan."

He wants to listen to her until she's lost her memory, she's stooped and brittle-boned and her sunbright hair is wispy and smoke-colored. Angel punches the wall and says, "Buffy."

"Angel?"

"Please, just - make this? For me?"

"Okay, crypto-guy," she says, and he *knows* her. Knows she's ignoring the rage and despair tightening his voice, roughening his words, knows she's choosing to tease. "What am I making?

The vision becomes reality. It is done.
He watches her scrawl the instructions down. Her handwriting is still a girl's, probably always will be, looping and messy, but her hand is small and strong. A fist around a purple pen.

White chrysanthemum for truth, bilberry for vision, sweet pea for farewell. She frowns when she answers the door and accepts the bouquet, and if he were a better man -- if he were a man at all -- he would be there to kiss the puzzlement off her face. To hold her and listen to her, fight by her side.

But he's not. He's here, watching, stalking her from the well-upholstered belly of the beast.

Smiling, her eyes flickering with uncertainty, she follows the directions. After kissing the stamen and pistil, Buffy beheads each flower and drops them into a bowl of water. Angel leans forward, hands gripping the counter, phone tucked precariously between ear and shoulder. He has no breath to hold, no heart to pound, but his eyes are open.

"I'm really doing this," she says under her breath.

He starts to answer, then bites his tongue. He tastes pig and otter, unclean and strange animals, and simply nods.

She shakes her head, pushes the hair from her eyes, and pricks her finger.

The blood drops over the bowl, a few dark beads that splash the water and petals, break into pink tendrils. She sucks her finger and lifts the bowl with her other hand, shaking it until the flowers sink and the water and blood mix.

"That's it?" she asks as the monitors dim.

"That's it," Angel says. "Thank you."

Buffy shrugs, still puzzled but more patient than he ever thought she could be. "You're a freak. You do know that, right?"

"I do. Bye, Buffy."

Snow and static, charcoal and silver, well like blood from the center of each monitor, clouding over the screens.

"Goodbye," she says and they all fade to black.

"Love you," Angel says and hangs up. She's safe from him now, safer than she's ever been, and as he stands up, he'd like very much to hit something.

He watches and remembers. She, though, looks forward, acting and loving in the present, and she is already, always has been, herself. She's not dough any more than he is a champion.

Unless we're all rising, all champions.

Angel locks the door behind him and goes back to work.

Notes: Section headings, in order, from:
Angel to Spike, "Damage" (AtS 5.11)
Drusilla to Angelus, "Becoming (Part 1)" (BtVS 2.21)
Angel to Lilah, "Home" (AtS 4.22)
Spike to Angel, "Destiny" (AtS 5.8)
Wo-Pang the shaman, "Awakening" (AtS 4.10)

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