disclaimer in part 1

Swan Song
By Diane
-----
THE THIRD HOMECOMING

Silence.

Buffy blinked as her legs buckled and she surrendered to
gravity. Blinked again. A sob. She started to shake.
Tremors ran through her like she was the fault line.
Bending, shifting. She couldn't stop shaking...

Everyone converged on her at once. "Buffy!"

People, all over her. Hugging her, crying for her, rocking
her back and forth. Noise. Everywhere. Too much... She
felt smothered.

Started inhaling desperately for air.

Angel.

Angelangelangelangel...

And then they all backed away as the air started to rumble
with the thick bass of a subwoofer on overdrive. Again.
"Not another one!" Xander groaned. Everyone began to fan
out, but Buffy remained collapsed on the ground, lungs
heaving with sobs she wasn't quite freeing from her body.

She closed her eyes. No. NONONONO...

But the portal was high in the air. Gold. Not crimson.

Buffy felt her heart leap and she started to tremble all
over again. But for a different reason. Please. Please,
please, please...

Two screaming bodies got spit out onto the pavement. Angel.
Spike. And there was blood all over, spreading outwards
from the epicenter in a puddle of coagulating mess. And not
all of it was Spike's. "Someone call the ambulance..."

Cordelia already had her cellular phone out. Buffy sighed
in relief. At least _someone_ was current with the world...

She was next to Angel and Spike in an instant. "Spike!"

Spike sat up with a grimace, shaking his head as he pointed
to Angel.

She turned to Angel, who's eyes were open, staring blankly
into space as he started to shiver. That was when she saw
his arm. The jagged wound trailed from his elbow to his
wrist, and his fingers were clutched tightly. Like he had
no feeling in them. "Oh, my GOD. ANGEL!" she shrieked.

Eyes watering, she was about ready to rip off some of her
pant leg when Spike thrust his shirt into her hand. "Here,"
he said.

"Thanks," she whispered, pressing it roughly on the weeping
tear in Angel's skin.

Everyone else was staying back. Keeping their distance.

Choking sobs were rolling out of her, tears blurring her
vision as she gathered him up in her arms. He looked so
pale...

"Buffy..." Angel mumbled. He blinked, but didn't appear to
see her. "I'm ok... Honest," he groaned. "At least in the
sense of not being dead..."

"His ankle's screwed up. Don't try to move him," Spike
warned, getting to his feet with a sigh and a curse. "I'd
better go before the paramedics get here," he said.

He started walking away, limping, footsteps echoing softly
on the pavement.

"Spike!"

He stopped, turned, and stared at her.

Angel groaned in her arms, his body shuddering, and she
gripped him tighter, hugged him desperately as she kept her
eyes on the blond vampire.

"Could you bring Dawn? To the hospital?" she asked,
hesitant.

A small, sad smile spread across his face. "Sure, Slayer.
I'll get Little Bit."

And then he disappeared into the night.

Angel groaned again, bucking slightly in her embrace.
"Angel, shhh," she soothed, caressing the smooth, silk skin
across his cheek and his forehead. "The paramedics will be
here soon... Don't die on me now..."

He grunted and his eyes closed, face pale and drawn as he
muttered, "I won't die."

"Sure you won't," Buffy argued playfully.

"If I was going to die, there'd be that bright light that
I'm just not seeing... 'Cept you..." A lazy smile spread
across his face.

"Well, I'm not sure if I believe you right now, so I'm going
to have to remain frantic..."

"M'kay," he said, drifting off even further, but still
awake.

She shook him, knowing he was probably going into shock.
His skin was cold and clammy, like a wet wash-rag, and she
suspected it was only his incredible pain endurance that was
keeping him so calm. "You can't go to sleep yet."

He grunted.

"I'm serious, Angel," she snapped as the flashing blue and
red lights of the paramedics flooded into the alcove.

There were people crowding around her in an instant. "How
long has he been down?" one of the medics asked.

"I don't know," Buffy shrugged, her arms tightening around
him. "Ten minutes?" she guessed, not knowing for sure.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to move..."

An oxygen mask went over Angel's face and they lifted him
onto a backboard as she stepped away. "Is he going to be
all right?" she asked, dreading what they might say. She
knew enough to know Angel wasn't out of the woods yet...

"I really don't know, ma'am."

"Well, GUESS, damn it," she growled, trying to get in the
ambulance with Angel, but they blocked her and didn't
answer.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to ride in a separate vehicle.
There's not enough room and it's against policy."

Angel was pale and still on the gurney as they slammed the
doors shut in her face and she backed away, shocked as the
ambulance sped away.

"Sunnydale paramedics suck," she said as Willow and Xander
came and enveloped her in a hug. Tears were streaming down
her face as they guided her into Gunn's truck, the only
vehicle that they'd brought.

Through the rearview mirror, she could blearily see her and
Angel's friends assembling into a big group, getting ready
to trek back to the house and find enough cars to get over
to the hospital in.

Gunn smiled as he hopped into the driver's seat. "I
wouldn't worry," he said with a grin. "Angel's been through
worse..." And then he gunned the engine and sped away
towards Sunnydale General, Cordelia's shakily scrawled
directions guiding him when shocked Buffy couldn't.

****

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Annoying.

He groaned, coming out of the fog and into an immaculate
white room with some reluctance. White, like the Oracle
sanctuary. Everything felt sluggish, like he wasn't
thinking quite as fast as he could have been.

He squinted, rotating his neck a bit, surprised to find that
he didn't feel any pain at all, even as he lifted his
bandaged arm to examine it. He looked down. There was a
blond head, hair sprawled out like a golden halo off to his
left.

Not the Oracle sanctuary, then. "Hi," he whispered, finding
that his voice cracked and sputtered, and barely came out at
all.

She snapped awake like someone had poked her with a stick.
"Angel!"

Buffy practically shrieked with joy, attacking him with
kisses. He grunted under her assault, giving in quite
happily as he wrapped both his bandaged arm and his
unbandaged one around her in a tight embrace.

Warm.

"You're awake!" she cried enthusiastically.

"How long?" He didn't finish his sentence, but she seemed
to understand.

"Couple hours," she shrugged. "It didn't take them long to
fix you. Cordelia was pacing a trough in the waiting room,
though. She'll probably come barging in here, soon."

He sighed, leaning back into the pillows, suddenly more
tired than anything else. Closing his eyes, he sighed.
"What am I on?" he groaned, lifting his uninjured arm to
examine the catheter running into it, barely able to open
his eyes far enough to see.

"Morphine."

"Mmm," he grunted. "Good stuff."

"The doctors say you'll probably need therapy to get your
hand back in working order, but other than that, you're
fine. You know, you're in pretty good shape considering
went through Hell to save the world... AGAIN. You, mister,
'what if I can't protect you?'" she mocked him, a prominent
glower suddenly overcoming her features.

He couldn't help but smile.

Infectious.

Her lips turned upwards the second his did, but then she
grew serious. "They want to know why that wound was self-
inflicted..." she warned. But the serious look bled into
another infections grin.

And, for some reason, as he stared at Buffy's smiling,
happy face, he didn't seem to care about anything
whatsoever. Not one bit. She was even better than the
morphine. "I'll think something up."

He closed his eyes and she was silent for a moment. All
he could hear was her breathing and that annoying beeping.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

If he hadn't been so damn tired, he would have punched the
thing into a billion _silent_ pieces. He could just picture
it now, shattering apart under his fist's savage attack...
BAM!

And then that fuzzy feeling came. The feeling between
wakefulness and sleep that always was his favorite, because
he didn't have any nightmares until after it was gone.

"Angel?"

Hesitant.

Forcing sleep away, he opened his eyes again. The lids
were droopy, and heavy, but he managed.

"Are you going back to L.A.?"

He sighed. Tired. Very tired. "I think so. I've still
got a job there. We'll see what we can work out, though,
ok?"

She smiled at that, but was still wary. "You're sure."

"Yes, Buffy. I promise I'm not leaving you again.
Honest..." he assured her with a wheezy chuckle.

The smile widened. "Ok," she whispered as she stood up,
stretched, stretched again. Yawned.

"Where are you going?" he asked, surprised and a little
dismayed that she was moving. It felt so comfortable with
her there. So right...

She shrugged. "Home."

"Oh." He felt his lofty, foggy feeling start to darken,
his smile start to sink, the Buffy drug flooding out of his
system and leaving him with the gaping yaw that was the
morphine.

But then, she stretched her body out along next to his like
a lithe cat, draping her arm across his stomach. Her entire
body heaved with a yawn as his own wakefulness started to
drift away, the beeping noise fading into the oblivion that
existed around their warm bodies.

Drifting away into the arms of his soulmate.

Home.

FIN

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