disclaimer in part 1

Swan Song
By Diane
-----
THE SONG

He blinked.

"So, we should be able to find the car by nightfall and
return through the portal..." Wesley mumbled, crouched over
the set of three books. Wolf. Ram. Hart. His eyes were
darting back and forth between the left, right, and middle
books, switching places whenever the text demanded for him
to do so. "This is fascinating," he mumbled.

Cordelia groaned, collapsing over top the table that she and
Wesley lounged at. "Thank GOD. I'm going to take a shower
the second I get home. And then I'm going to sleep in my
big, fluffy bed with my big fluffy pillow, in my nice cozy,
haunted apartment, and never ever complain again that I have
to live with a ghost and a ridiculously low salary..." she
sighed.

Gunn rolled his eyes. "I'll bet that mindset lasts for all
of five minutes..."

He merely smiled when she sent a scathing glare in his
direction. It was a simple wonder he didn't burst into a
halo of flames, right there. "Thank you for your
confidence, oh great demon fighter from the hood..." she
snapped.

Fred was smiling.

He blinked again.

He stood there, book in hand, mouth hanging slightly open as
his reflection stared back at him.

"Angel, stop looking in the damn mirror, already. You're a
god. You're hot. Women fall before you. We're all
drowning in our own drool. Just get over it," Cordelia
whined somewhere behind him. The mirror let him see over
his shoulder, and peer at the her as her large, brown eyes
rolled in an exaggerated show of irritation. The tiara that
sat atop her head glittered with the slight movement of her
neck.

And suddenly Lorne was standing there, right over his
shoulder.

"You might want to sit down," he said, his red eyes filling
with concern.

Angel turned to look at him. "What?"

He blinked again.

And then, it hit him like a boxer on steroids. His chest
felt like it was compacting inwards, and his ribs, like they
were snapping, giving into the force that beset him and
crumpling underneath it -- an insect's legs curling inwards
on its corpse.

The Host grabbed him and eased him to the ground as the
muscles in his legs utterly failed. Everything went into
overload. All his nerve endings began rapid firing at once,
bringing burning, shooting twinges rocketing through his
system. Stars splashed about in front of him, and his
vision began to blur into one big multicolored acid trip
hallucination. The very air itself seemed to be bending in
front of him. Bending with color, sparkling bits of
glitter, and those neat little bits of sequins that littered
Cordelia's skimpy attire.

"Angel!"

He heard the screech from far away, behind and echoing,
frenzied deafening roar.

The blood began to rush.

He arched backward on the floor, flopping about like a
landed fish as he struggled to take something. Something
was missing that he needed. He needed to--

BREATHE!!!

Something smacked him hard on the back and the air went
whooshing into his lungs, filling them to an almost painful
point before it was let back out again. In and out. In an
out, in several, great, monstrous breaths. He could almost
feel the air gripping him, chilling him and warming him from
the inside out. Struggling, he gasped for more. More, and
more, and more...

"Angel," Lorne was saying, "Try not to suck the entire
atmosphere in with you... Some of us need it to speak..."

He blinked furiously and tried to calm down, but the roar
was still there. The roar and the warmth and the tingling
rush... He gasped, and gasped, and gasped, until there were
black waterfalls tumbling over his vision, replacing the
sparkly, pretty colors that had been there just previous.
Was this what hyperventilation felt like?

Thump-thump.

Something smacked about, jarring underneath his breastbone
as it struggled to move within him. It hurt. It hurt. It
HURT.

Another spasm. His hands flew up to clutch at his heaving
chest. He clawed at himself -- a fox trying to free itself
from a trap, mindless. Panicked. It hurt. It hurt. It
HURT.

"What's happening? Oh my god, what's happening?"

The shriek. Far off again.

Thump-thump.

This time his entire torso bucked upwards as the pain
clenched his heart and squeezed it into an unforgiving vice.
He was pretty sure that he was screaming. Or gasping,
maybe. He couldn't tell. But there was this strange,
hoarse, choking, dying sound. Maybe that was him.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The pain gradually left him, then, and he felt Lorne's
finger pressing into his neck over the jugular. "Yup," he
nodded, but said nothing else.

"Yup??? YUP WHAT?" Cordelia. Again with the shrieking.

It made his ears hurt.

Angel couldn't get his vocal chords to work. Or anything
else for that matter. All of his muscles were still jerking
and twitching with spasms of energy. His eyes widened as he
lay there, gasping, sucking in breath because he needed it.
He NEEDED it.

The moment he tried to stop, his vision started getting all
black again. Black and waterfally, and then he felt light
headed. He stopped trying to experiment with that.

Another set of fingers at his neck. Wesley. "He's human!"
Wesley exclaimed.

Everything started to wobble about, and he was very confused
until he figured out that someone was shaking him. "Angel?"
He grunted as he was flung roughly about. Well, it _seemed_
like he was being flung roughly about.

"Dude, give the man some space, he don't look so good," Gunn
mumbled.

Somewhere far away, Angel could see Gunn staring at him,
eyes wide. Curious. Again, he tried to work his vocal
chords, but things just didn't seem to be coming back online
fast enough. His heart and his lungs were going full steam
ahead, but the rest was lagging behind like a tired runner
in a marathon.

And then...

Something weird was happening in his stomach. Something
weird and strange, and it felt... awful... He groaned and
somehow managed to roll onto his stomach before he began to
heave, dry and empty. There was nothing to come up, he
hadn't eaten in days.

The biting hunger he had felt before melted away and was
replaced by weakness. A shaky feeling that he instinctively
knew was hunger. Not lust. Hunger. _Real_ hunger.

"Breathe, Angel. Breathe," Cordelia soothed. Her hands
were rubbing up and down his back.

Breathe, Angel. Breathe. He didn't think he'd ever heard
that before.

He groaned as his stomach finally calmed down, and began to
wonder what else would bug him as it started to work again.
Relaxing, he stretched out on the floor, still too weak to
get up.

Cordelia was smiling. "Well, that was unexpected..." she
whispered, and then she turned to Wesley, a look of concern
crossing over her features. "This _was_ his Shanshu, right?
Not some other thing we're going to have to find Oracles to
reverse time for. Right?"

Wesley shrugged. "I..." He struggled for words,
astonished. "I don't know... I... This..."

"Angel, can you talk, yet?" Cordelia prodded. He felt her
feather-light, warm touch on his twitching, collapsed
muscles. He was surprised to notice how different it felt,
now. How strange, and new, that he didn't crave her touch
simply because of the temperature of it.

"Why am I not dead?" he whispered, the sound that emanated
from his vocal chords sounding something just short of a
knife clanking over a cheese grater.

She frowned at him. "That wasn't exactly what I was
expecting to hear."

Wesley crouched down. "He's probably a bit disoriented...
How many fingers am I holding up?"

Two fingers floated lazily above him, but he didn't bother
to answer the question.

Angel closed his eyes and took a deep, refreshing breath.
Had it all been a dream? The pain, he had felt the sun
disintegrating him as his arms stretched up towards the
heavens. Towards Buffy. He had felt it, he was sure.

But now he was here. Back in Pylea.

He shook his head, and then it occurred to him.

"We have to leave, now," he said, struggling to his feet
despite Cordelia's protests that he stay still a little
longer. The disorientation and dizziness that came with the
movement faded quickly, and as he let the black dots
disappear from his vision, he repeated himself.

The others stood, gaping.

"Angel, we have to wait until nightfall to..."

"I don't care," he snapped. "We're leaving _now_. We have
to get back before..."

Before Buffy dies.

"Before what?" Gunn began cautiously.

Before Buffy dies.

He stared at Wesley. "Please, we have to go now," he said,
the tone in his voice pleading, begging. Needing. He
needed to be certain that this was all a dream. Some
strange side-effect of this dimension. Then, and only then,
would he allow himself to get excited about this. This need
for breath, and circulation, and all the other things he had
been without for two and a half centuries.

Only after he was sure...

Something suddenly occurred to him.

< You might want to sit down... >

He spun around on wobbly feet and took hold of the lapels of
the Host's shirt. "How did you know?!" he cried, but his
strength was utterly failing him in the menace department.

Lorne just smiled. "You know."

< One of these days you'll wake up from this nightmare that
is Woodstock '99 and realize what she's done for you... >

This nightmare.

Nightmare...

"You were there? You remember, too?"

The Host nodded.

"This..." He gestured to himself. "This is from her?"

< Death was her gift TO YOU. >

He shook Lorne hard. "Where is she? Is she dead?" he
growled, but the sound came out strangled and very
ineffective. He no longer had the capacity to make such
bellows of menace. He was a living, breathing, human being.
Humans couldn't growl, at least not in a cat-like sense...

Hands were on his shoulders, pulling him away from Lorne --
Gunn and Wesley, just as Cordelia started her shrieking
again. "Would someone care to clue me in here? Because I'm
lost... As in the sense of what country am I in lost...
Not the gee, I think Bloomingdale's is that way, but I'm not
quite sure way..."

Angel glared at Lorne, gaze intense and terrifying. "Is
she? Is she dead?"

Lorne shrugged. "I was never debriefed on that part.
Sorry."

With another strangled, supposed-to-be-a-growl, Angel lunged
forward, but Gunn grabbed the back of his coat and yanked
him backwards. He whipped backwards like a yo-yo reaching
the end of its string. "Chill, man," he said.

Wesley stood between the green demon and Angel. "Now, would
either of you care to explain what's going on?" he asked
calmly, "Or will I have to beat it out of you? And Angel, I
_can_ beat it out of you now..."

Angel let loose an exasperated sigh. "I don't know! That's
what I'm trying to figure out myself..." He narrowed his
eyes at the Host, who visibly withered under his cutting
gaze.

Lorne didn't smile anymore. "His little Buffy's gift was
death. She gave it to him, ala Shanshu." He made a funny,
sweeping gesture with his hands before he continued, "They
had a little trouble jump-starting the whole deal, so They
had to let it fester a bit -- you know, a whole, charging
the batteries thing. Sorry about that... You know, you
almost screwed it up with your suicidal tendencies... There
was no _way_ They could have fixed that mess."

Wesley looked at Lorne calmly, but his eyes flashed with a
fiery countenance. "They."

The Host pointed upwards. "They," he said, enunciating
clearly with exaggerated movement of his lips and tongue.

"What about the portal? The one that killed her..." Angel
asked.

Angel could see from the moment that he asked the question,
that Lorne, while he was more clued in than the rest of the
group, was by no means a fountain of knowledge on the
subject. He had done his job, and that was it.

Angel felt worry growing in the pit of his stomach. Worry,
and dread, and fear, and every other feeling he didn't want,
with sickening clarity. He almost started to heave again,
but Cordelia caught him in time and calmed him down. Calmed
him down.

Calm...

The rest was a blur.

They made it to the Belvedere with blinding speed, the
worried look on his face driving the group forward with no
questions asked. Even Fred seemed to be putting in that
extra speed.

"Krv Drpglr pwlz chkwrt strplmt dwghzn prqlrzn lffrmtplzt."

And then they were home.

More blur. The car had reappeared in Caritas.

And so Angel had leapt from the vehicle and started running.
Running towards the Hyperion, where Wesley had left his
motorcycle. Running, running, running. Somehow, the others
managed to keep up with him, lagging several seconds behind,
but not far enough for them to lose sight of him.

And then he was there, in the lobby.

Deja vu.

Willow was there, looking at him. Her eyes looked
different, but still... sad.

"Hi, what's..." Cordelia began.

"It's Buffy," Angel cut her off. He felt cold, all of the
sudden. Cold, and freezing, and dead, and dying, and
screaming, and... He slipped to his knees, waiting for the
news. The news he didn't want to hear.

White knuckles as he closed his eyes.

The world was all a blur when Spike popped out of his office
with a strange look on his face. "Damn straight, it's
Buffy. Why else would I visit you, you big bleedin'
poof..." he said.

A pause.

"Hey," Spike added when no one bothered to respond. "What
the fuck did you do to your heart? It bloody works!"

Angel's eyes finally slid open, and he stared at his childe
in shock as his deja vu fluttered away on the wings of
oblivion.

continue